fflBROSSLIBRARYi

II

LAKE FOREST
COLLEGE

A

GIFT OF

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IVIicrosoft Corporation

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THE BROSS LIBRARY

The Problem of the Old Testament, by

James Orr, D.D. (Bross Prize, 1905.)

The Mythical Interpretation of the Gos-
pels, by Thomas Jambs Thorburn, D.D.,
LL.D. (Bross Prize, igis)

Faith Justified by Progress, by H. W.
Wright, Ph.D.

The Will to Freedom, or the Gospel of
Nietzsche and the Gospel of Christ, by

John Neville Figgis, D.D., Litt.D.
(/» Press.)

The Bible: Its Origin and Nature, by

Marcus Dods, D.D.

The Bible of Nature, by J. Arthur Thom-
son, M.A.

The Religions of Modern Syria and Pales-
tine, by Frederick Jones Bliss, Ph.D.

The Sources of Religious Insight, by Josiab
RoYCE, Ph.D., LL.D.

THE BROSS LIBRARY

VOLUME IX

THE BROSS LECTURES , . 1916

FAITH JUSTIFIED BY
PROGRESS

LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE LAKE FOREST

COLLEGE ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE

LATE WILLIAM BROSS

BY

HENRY WILKES WRIGHT, Ph.D.

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN LAKE FOREST COLLEGE

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1916

fV

/^

T'^

.V^'

.1-

Copyright, 1916, by
THE TRUSTEES OF LAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY

Published October, 1916

THE BROSS FOUNDATION

The Bross Library is an outgrowth of
a fund established in 1879 by the late
William Bross, Lieutenant-Governor of Il-
linois from 1866 to 1870. Desiring some
memorial of his son, Nathaniel Bross, who
died in 1856, Mr. Bross entered into an
agreement with the "Trustees of Lake
Forest University," whereby there was
finally transferred to them the sum of
forty thousand dollars, the income of which
was to accumulate in perpetuity for succes-
sive periods of ten years, the accumulation
of one decade to be spent in the follow-
ing decade, for the purpose of stimulat-
ing the best books or treatises "on the
connection, relation, and mutual bearing
of any practical science, the history of
our race, or the facts in any department
of knowledge, with and upon the Chris-

345350

vi THE BROSS FOUNDATION

tian Religion." The object of the donor
was to *'eall out the best efforts of the
highest talent and the ripest scholarship
of the world to illustrate from science, or
from any department of knowledge, and
to demonstrate the divine origin and the
authority of the Christian Scriptures; and,
further, to show how both science and
revelation coincide and prove the exist-
ence, the providence, or any or all of
the attributes of the only living and true
God, 'infinite, eternal, and unchangeable
in His being, wisdom, power, holiness,
justice, goodness, and truth.' "

The gift contemplated in the original
agreement of 1879 was finally consum-
mated in 1890. The first decade of the
accumulation of interest having closed in
1900, the Trustees of the Bross Fund
began at this time to carry out the pro-
visions of the deed of gift. It was de-
termined to give the general title of "The
Bross Library" to the series of books pur-
chased and published with the proceeds

THE BROSS FOUNDATION vii

of the Bross Fund. In accordance with
the express wish of the donor, that the
"Evidences of Christianity" of his "very-
dear friend and teacher, Mark Hopkins,
D.D.," be purchased and "ever numbered
and known as No. 1 of the series," the
Trustees secured the copyright of this
work, which has been repubHshed in a
presentation edition as Volume I of the
Bross Library.

The trust agreement prescribed two meth-
ods by which the production of books and
treatises of the nature contemplated by
the donor was to be stimulated:

1. The Trustees were empowered to offer
one or more prizes during each decade,
the competition for which was to be thrown
open to "the scientific men, the Christian
philosophers and historians of all nations."
In accordance with this provision, a prize
of $6,000 was offered in 1902 for the best
book fulfilling the conditions of the deed
of gift, the competing manuscripts to be
presented on or before June 1, 1905. The

viii THE BROSS FOUNDATION

prize was awarded to the late Reverend
James Orr, D.D., Professor of Apologetics
and Systematic Theology in the United
Free Church College, Glasgow, for his
treatise on "The Problem of the Old Testa-
ment," which was published in 1906 as
Volume III of the Bross Library.

The second Decennial Prize of $6,000
was offered in 1913, the competing manu-
scripts to be submitted by January 1, 1915.
The prize was awarded by the judges to a
manuscript entitled "The Mythical In-
terpretation of the Gospels," by the Rev-
erend Thomas James Thorburn, D.D.,
LL.D., St. Helen's Down, Hastings, Eng-
land. This essay was published in 1916
as Volume VII of the Bross Library.

The next Bross Prize will be offered
about 1925, and will be announced in due
time by the Trustees of Lake Forest Uni-
versity.

2. The Trustees were also empowered
to "select and designate any particular
scientific man or Christian philosopher

THE BROSS FOUNDATION ix

and the subject on which he shall write/'
and to "agree with him as to the sum he
shall receive for the book or treatise to
be written." Under this provision the
Trustees have, from time to time, invited
eminent scholars to deliver courses of lec-
tures before Lake Forest College, such
courses to be subsequently pubUshed as
volumes in the Bross Library. The first
course of lectures, on "Obligatory Moral-
ity," was delivered in May, 1903, by the
Reverend Francis Landey Patton, D.D.,
LL.D., then President of Princeton Theo-
logical Seminary. The copyright of these
lectures is now the property of the Trustees
of the Bross Fund. The second course of
lectures, on "The Bible: Its Origin and
Nature," was delivered in May, 1904, by
the Reverend Marcus Dods, D.D., Pro-
fessor of Exegetical Theology in New Col-
lege, Edinburgh. These lectures were pub-
lished in 1905 as Volume II of the Bross
Library. The third course of lectures, on
"The Bible of Nature," was delivered in

X THE BROSS FOUNDATION

September and October, 1907, by Mr. J.
Arthur Thomson, M.A., Regius Professor
of Natural History in the University of
Aberdeen. These lectures were pubHshed
in 1908 as Volume IV of the Bross Library.
The fourth course of lectures, on *'The
ReUgions of Modern Syria and Palestine,"
was delivered in November and December,
1908, by Frederick Jones BUss, Ph.D., of
Beirut, Syria. These lectures were pub-
lished in 1912 as Volume V of the Bross
Library. The fifth course of lectures, on
"The Sources of Religious Insight," was
delivered in November, 1911, by Professor
Josiah Royce, Ph.D., of Harvard Uni-
versity. These lectures were published
in 1912 as Volume VI of the Bross Library.
The sixth course of lectures, on "The Will
to Freedom, or the Gospel of Nietzsche
and the Gospel of Christ," was delivered
in May, 1915, by the Reverend J. Ne-
ville Figgis, D.D., Litt.D., of the House
of the Resurrection, Mirfield, England.
These lectures will be published as Volume

THE BROSS FOUNDATION xi

VIII of the Bross Library. The seventh
course of lectures, on "Faith Justified by
Progress," was deUvered in April and May,
1916. These lectures are embodied in the
present volume.

John Scholte Nollen,
President, Lake Forest College.

Lake Forest, Illinois,
June, 1916.

PREFACE

In this essay I make no attempt to give
an adequate account of the course of
social evolution or to trace in detail the
development of the religious conscious-
ness. Least of all is it my purpose to
take up the problem of origins, either as
pertaining to social organization generally
or with reference to religious belief in
particular. Rather, my aim is to describe
certain types of social life important enough
to be regarded as leading stages in social
or moral evolution, and to find out if
possible the part played by reUgious faith
in each one. The forms and features of
human society to which reference is made
are too well known to need illustration
from sources, historical or ethnological;
such citations would, in my judgment,
only distract the attention of the reader

xiii

XIV PREFACE

from the main interest of the essay, which
is that of interpretation. A study of the
functions discharged by rehgious faith in
the leading stages of social life must, I
believe, throw light upon the essential
nature of religion; it will also suggest, I
hope, the work which religion has still to
accomplish in the advance of civilization.
Such hope has been the inspiration of this
writing.

Henry Wilkes Wright.

Lake Forest, Illinois,
June 26, 1916.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Introduction : The Rise of Natural-
ism AND THE Eclipse of Faith . 1

I. The Will as the True Source of

Human Progress 45

II. The Primitive Life 59

III. The Natural Life 87

IV. The Supernatural Life .... 130
V. The Universal Life 197

Postscript : The Future of Religion 262

Index 285

INTRODUCTION

THE RISE OF NATURALISM AND THE
ECLIPSE OF FAITH

Faith we shall here understand as be-
lief that the ideals of personal life can be
realized, a belief which is affirmed and
acted upon in advance of proof from ac-
tual experience. Like all attempts to ex-
press in verbal formula a familiar mental
state, this definition is somewhat arbitrary
and will probably meet objection. To
some it may seem to broaden unduly the
province of faith; to others it will appear
in just as unwarranted a way to restrict
the range of faith's activity. A critic of
the first class would undoubtedly assert
that our definition so enlarged the mean-
ing of faith as to make it identical with
religion itself — and morality as well. For
what, he would ask, is religion in essence

but such an attitude of confidence in the

1

;V ; 2. «.;*.. R4ITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

ultimate reality, confidence, that is, that
the real universe provides for the final
satisfaction of personality? The truth of
this assertion is freely admitted, but we
refuse to find in it any objection to the
conception of faith which we propose to
adopt. For a philosophical study of the
meaning and implications of faith proves
it to be this very thing, the essence of
morality and of religion as well. The
second objection is of opposite tenor and
will come from those who are unwilling
to restrict the action of faith to the moral
and religious spheres. Are not, they will
ask, the confidence of the business man
in the economic soundness and eventual
prosperity of his country and that of
the ambitious youth in his own powers
to achieve professional success and re-
nown genuine cases of faith .^ In so far
as the confidence, in these two instances
and many others that might be cited from
diflFerent fields of conduct, is a sincere
belief in the powers of personality to ac-

INTRODUCTION 3

complish its purposes, they assuredly are.
But in this instance, we should hold, they
are but particular and partial expressions
of that underlying confidence that the
ends of self-conscious personality can be
realized, which may rightfully claim recogni-
tion as the primary and fundamental faith.
If we thus conceive of faith as the con-
fidence of human personality that the real
world permits of its continued develop-
ment and final satisfaction, it is obvious
that we cannot with correctness contrast
certain epochs or periods of human history
as possessing faith with others as lacking
it. Without some measure of confidence
in the power of his own will to accomplish
its proper purposes, man could not con-
tinue to exist at all; certainly no social
order could survive and make its contribu-
tion to human civilization. But the con-
fidence in question may be more explicitly
avowed and constantly reflected on in
one age than in another. So in historic
fact it was in the Middle Ages; hence not

4 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

inappropriately the mediaeval period has
been called the age of faith. The absorbing
intellectual interest of this period was hu-
man salvation, the preservation of man's
soul in its essence and integrity from all
the corrupting and destroying influences of
the material world. Such conservation of
human personality, despaired of in the
deepening gloom that attended the close
of the ancient era, mediaeval thought con-
fidently and joyfully believed had been
secured through the divine plan of redemp-
tion. This divine redemptive plan became
consequently the ceaseless preoccupation
of men's minds in this period; it was for
them the one end toward which the whole
creation moved. With reference to this
one end of man's salvation through the
divine redemptive process, they interpreted
all the facts of human experience. The
one purpose of their thinking was to for-
mulate, clearly and exhaustively, the Chris-
tian plan of salvation, and then to dis-
cover how the events of human history

INTRODUCTION 5

and the objects and creatures of the ma-
terial world contributed as means to the
furtherance of this sublime end. Thus
in dealing with natural phenomena, it
knew but one method of interpretation,
the teleological: the existence of objects
was explained by showing the moral or
religious purpose they subserved. To un-
dertake such a detailed description and
classification of existing objects as con-
stitutes the foundation of modern science,
it had not the slightest inclination; it had
little or no interest in the natural world
for its own sake or in the relation of
natural objects among themselves. Hence
the thought of this period sought to ex-
plain the existence of objects, not by show-
ing their natural causes, but by searching
out the uses which they had for man, and
particularly their value for man's spiritual
edification. And when by no effort of
the imagination it was possible to con-
nect an object or event with the divine
plan for human salvation, it was treated

6 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

as a symbol, a divinely prepared lesson of
spiritual truth. To the natural world
apart from these supposed spiritual uses
the mediaeval attitude was one of dis-
dainful indifiference: it was not worth the
time and trouble required for its patient
and thorough study. Little wonder that
modern science has shown an antagonism
to such teleology so bitter and relentless
as to seem, in this day of general toleration
unreasonable! Teleology of this kind rep-
resents not merely a method diflFerent from,
and opposed to, the causal investigation
of nature; it represents the depreciation
and denial of all natural science whatso-
ever.

In the course of time, mediaeval thought
developed a fairly complete world-view.
This world-view was borrowed from sev-
eral sources, its constituent features being
selected because of their harmony with
the ruhng preconception of the period.
Its cosmogony was derived from a literal
interpretation of the first chapters of Gene-

INTRODUCTION 7

sis. The world was created by God out
of nothing in six Hteral days, designed by
the divine will to be the home of man, and
every other living thing was also separately
created and likewise designed to serve him
who bore God's image. Its astronomy was
taken from the ancient system of Ptolemy.
The earth was the centre of the universe:
the heavenly bodies, sun, moon, and stars,
revolved round the earth, giving man the
heat and Ught he needed by day and by
night. The physics of Aristotle was ad-
mirably suited to complete this concep-
tion of the physical universe. The earth
was the seat of imperfect motion, hence
the scene of change and decay. Motion
becomes less variable and more perfect as
the spheres succeed one another until the
outermost is reached, where motion is per-
fect and eternally the same. This outer-
most sphere is the heaven of heavens, the
abode of deity. This world-scheme of the
mediaeval mind, had two striking merits:
it agreed both with the demands of man's

8 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

spiritual welfare as he then understood
them and also with the facts as they ap-
peared to sense-perception.

The modern world has largely lost that
faith which possessed and inspired the
mediaeval mind. Our loss of faith is to a
considerable extent due to the fact that
the advance of knowledge has compelled
modern thought to abandon the mediaeval
world-view. Modern science has given us
in its place the universe of natural law, a
universe in which it is far more diflScult
to find any provision for man's continued
personal development and ultimate sal-
vation. In the formation of the modern
scientific world-view the first and perhaps
the most important step was the discovery
by Copernicus that the sun and not the
earth was the centre of the solar system,
that the earth was, in fact, but one of a
number of satellites, moving around the
sun and revolving upon its own axis as
well. We have become so famiHar with
these ideas, the very A B C of astronomical

INTRODUCTION 9

science, that we may altogether fail to ap-
preciate their revolutionary import for hu-
man thought. We cannot understand why
they aroused such a fury of opposition
among churchmen, Catholic and Protestant
alike. But when once we grasp the signifi-
cance of the change which the Copernican
astronomy wrought in man's conception
of his world we no longer wonder that the
Church combated it with such unrestrained
violence, with such desperate earnestness;
for the belief that man's salvation through
the divinely appointed plan is the end for
which the whole world exists seems to re-
quire as its logical consequence the further
behef that the earth, the stage on which
this tremendous drama of man's fall and
redemption is enacted, is the centre of the
universe. Everything else, the whole choir
of heaven, sun, moon, and stars, is reduced
to the position of mere stage-setting, is
made accessory and subsidiary to human
concerns. But what a different position
does modern astronomy assign to the earth

10 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

in relation to the rest of the physical uni-
verse ! It has not even the importance of
a star; it is only a satelHte of what Laf-
cadio Hearn calls a "tenth-rate yellow
sun," a sun like which there are countless
others among the host of stars. Such then
is the home of man, and the race of man
itself but a swarm of living beings inhabit-
ing the surface of such a planet as it swings
on its orbit; his position in the universal
system is thus one of utter insignificance.
Ought we then to feel surprise when we
read that in 1631 a Roman Catholic prelate
declared: "The opinion of the earth's mo-
tion is of all heresies the most abominable,
the most pernicious, the most scandalous;
the immutabihty of the earth is thrice
sacred; argument against the immortality
of the soul, the existence of God, and the
incarnation should be tolerated sooner
than an argument that the earth moves".f^
The world of mediaeval thought was a
world small enough for man to feel at home
in. If not itself man's spiritual home, it

INTRODUCTION 11

was so arranged as to enable man to get
his spiritual bearings: for was not heaven
itself located at the outermost stellar
sphere? The world of modern astronomy-
is a lonesome, an awesome, an inhuman
sort of place where are furnaces of heat so
intense that one faint breath would suffice
to consume every living creature of earth,
and frozen solitudes immeasurably vast
through which go hurtling masses of mat-
ter able on collision to shatter our earth to
dust. In such a universe, infinitely ex-
tended in space and time, man's life, the
whole course of his history upon earth
seems but the merest flicker destined to
leave, even in the place of its occurrence,
scarcely a trace.

Soon after Copernicus made his startling
discovery that the earth moves around
the sun, Kepler discovered that the dis-
tribution and orbits of the planets agree
with the forms and principles of geometry,
showing that the path of planetary revolu-
tion is an ellipse and that the laws of plane-

12 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

tary motion are based upon this figure.
This remarkable demonstration that the
physical world was ordered in definite
quantitative relations served both to es-
tablish the Copernican astronomy and to
add one more stone to the foundation of
the modern mechanical world-view. In
the seventeenth century Newton completed
the work of Kepler by showing that the
direction and velocity of planetary motion
were instances of a still more fundamental
quantitative uniformity which held of all
motion of all bodies in the physical world.
Thus it was the privilege of Newton, work-
ing in ground already prepared by Galileo,
to complete the foundations of modern
physics; for the verification of the gravi-
tation formula that every particle or atom
or body in the universe attracts every
other with a force proportional to their
masses taken conjointly, and inversely pro-
portional to the square of their distances
apart, meant that the mechanical laws
which hold good on the surface of the

INTRODUCTION 13

earth were valid throughout the universe;
that, in short, the physical universe was
a huge machine.

By the middle of the eighteenth century,
attempts were being made to complete the
mechanical world-system which had been
so rapidly and securely established. To
accomplish this it was necessary to ex-
plain the origin of the natural world by
the same mechanical principles that were
shown to control its operation, and to ac-
count for the birth and development of
life and of mind in terms of mechanical
causation. This the philosopher Kant at-
tempted to do. Being desirous of proving
that the divine interference which Newton
believed was required to account for the
origin of the world-machine could be dis-
pensed with, Kant in an early work, The
General History of Nature and Theory of
the Heavens (1755), tried to show that the
origin of the physical universe could be
explained according to mechanical law,
and, to this end, formulated a theory of

14 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

world-origin which anticipates in a remark-
able fashion the essential features of the
nebular hypothesis, later proposed by La-
place and generally adopted. In other works
which also fall within the earlier period of
his intellectual career, Kant endeavored to
explain the origin, growth, and differentia-
tion of living beings by natural causes,
holding that all higher forms may be
traced back to simpler elementary forms,
and that present differences in species are
due to the direct influence of changing ex-
ternal conditions, such as climate, food,
etc. Not even man would he exempt from
the mechanical system, but he proposed to
account for his origin and development by
the same natural causes. Kant's attempt
thus to make mechanism universal proved
to be premature, however; he himself
abandoned it and withdrew to a more
conservative position in later life. Over-
zealous partisans of natural science have
attributed Kant's abandonment of his
earlier evolutionism to the conservatism of

. INTRODUCTION 15

advancing age reinforced by a reluctance
to break completely with the traditional
theology. But such charges are quite un-
justified; the reasons which determined
Kant thus to change his view were the
very same which influenced great natural-
ists Uke Buffon in the closing decade of
the eighteenth century to abandon all be-
lief in organic evolution and hold fast to
special creation. These reasons were fur-
nished by the forms and structures of the
living organism itself, as those were at that
time being discovered and described through
microscopical investigation and systematic
research. Such scientific study served only
to set in clearer light the marvellous adap-
tations characteristic of life and living
creatures, adaptations of species to their
environment, and of organs and structures
to their function and use. To account for
such beautifully contrived, for such finely
adjusted structures, no natural cause suf-
ficed; before them mechanism was dumb;
outside the province of physical law they

16 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

seemed destined to remain, as living wit-
nesses to the contriving skill of divine in-
telligence. To such a compromise Kant
finally came: the inorganic world he be-
lieved capable of thoroughgoing mechan-
ical formulation, but the organic world, he
thought, could be explained only in terms
of creative purpose.

Nearly a century elapsed before Dar-
win, master-mind of the nineteenth cen-
tury, as Kant was of the eighteenth, re-
moved this last great obstacle to the
extension of natural law by bringing the
realm of life within the domain of physical
causation. Darwin's achievement was two-
fold. In the first place, he assembled and
arranged a mass of evidence, in cumulative
effect fairly convincing, that the different
forms of life now existent owe their origin
not to so many creative acts of Deity but
to a natural process of development. Sec-
ondly, he made the discovery, of which
Kant despaired, of a natural cause or proc-
ess able to account for the existence of

INTRODUCTION 17

those organic structures which, because
plainly adapted as means to the fulfilment
of an end, we are naturally disposed to
refer to the work of a designing intelligence.
Of these two achievements perhaps the
second was the more notable; for, until
a natural cause could be imagined and
verified able to produce these purposive
structures, human thought would be justi-
fied in holding to an exclusively teleolog-
ical explanation of their origin. But, as
we are aware, Darwin showed that, given
the constant occurrence in living forms of
minute variations that are inherited, then,
in the struggle to exist which follows from
the rapid rate of multiplication of such
living beings, those variations which best
fit the organism to Hve and prosper in its
environment will be preserved and trans-
mitted, while all others will be eliminated.
As the result of these causes, variations
are accumulated along those lines which
adapt the organism to exist and survive;
thus, gradually, the complicated adapta-

18 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

tions of living tissue, at which we marvel,
take their rise. Of late years there has
been some talk among scientists of the
decline and even of the "death" of "Dar-
winism," and from this some anxious spirits
have derived consolation, thinking that it
means the abandonment by science of the
evolution theory. But when such state-
ments are made by persons competent to
judge, the Darwinism referred to is the
view that natural selection is the all-suf-
ficient cause of organic evolution. This
latter was not even the view of Darwin
himself, but of some of his followers, par-
ticularly those influenced by Wallace and
Weismann. Darwin in later years came
more and more to doubt the adequacy of
natural selection to explain all the facts,
and found himself assigning a constantly
increasing importance to such other fac-
tors as use and disuse and the direct
action of the environment. In a letter
written late in life he confesses with char-
acteristic candor to his chagrin over this

INTRODUCTION 19

fact because it diminished the credit due
to natural selection, the factor which he
had discovered and which was destined to
be identified forever with his name.

The latter half of the nineteenth century-
saw the scientific world-view in its main
outlines completed. The natural sciences,
brought into correlation by the compre-
hensive principle of evolution, conceived
of the universe as a system whose parts
are determined not by an overruKngintel-
ligence but by resident forces which act
and react with mechanical uniformity. As
this world-view gained influence over men's
minds and won increasing acceptance in
intelligent circles of modern society, it
weakened faith and threatened to de-
stroy it altogether; for such a universe
as evolutionary science depicted seemed
itself to demonstrate the futility of faith.
Belief that the ideals of personal life can
be realized is rational only if such realiza-
tion is a possibiHty. ' But man's personal
development requires that he be able to

20 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

choose his ideal, to plan the steps in its
realization, to subject natural objects and
forces to the achievement of his purpose,
and finally to experience the satisfaction
of its realization. This in its turn im-
plies, on man's side, freedom, initiative,
and personal permanence; on the side of
nature, the capacity to respond to new
forces and to enter into new relations.
But how is this possible in a mechanically
determined system .^^ The same machinery
which in its regular workings struck ofif
the spark of man's soul must in a short
time extinguish it, and that little corner of
the universe which for a brief while knew
man and his busy pretensions would know
him no more. This effect of modern nat-
uralism in destroying man's faith in his
own personal ideals and his own spiritual
destiny, Huxley describes in a passage be-
come classic: "The consciousness of this
great truth" ("the extension of matter
and causation and the concomitant banish-
ment of spirit and spontaneity") "weighs

INTRODUCTION 21

like a nightmare upon many of the best
minds of these days. They watch what
they conceive to be the progress of ma-
teriaUsm in such fear and powerless anger
as a savage feels when during an eclipse
the great shadow creeps over the face of
the sun. The advancing tide of matter
threatens to drown their souls, the tight-
ening grasp of law impedes their free-
dom."

Modern philosophy, however, has found
new grounds for the faith which the ad-
vancing shadow of naturalism threatened
totally to eclipse, and these grounds he
in the method and presuppositions of ex-
perimental science itself. It was then no
accident that turned the attention of phi-
losophers in modern times to the processes
and problems of knowledge: the facts of
epistemology were just the counterbalance
needed to offset the sweeping conclusions
of science and prepare the way for a truly
synthetic view. These epistemological
studies of early modern philosophers cul-

22 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

minated in the epoch-making insight of
the philosopher Kant which brought about
what he Kked to call a Copernican revolu-
tion in the science of knowledge. Now
Kant was not only a student of philo-
sophical problems; he was well versed in
modern science and had given special at-
tention to the Newtonian mechanics. New-
ton's system made a deep impression upon
him: from its study he gained that insight
which is fundamental to his system; for
Kant was the first to apprehend in its real
significance the fact that the sciences of
mathematics and physics are not accumu-
lations of sense-facts, but instead are gen-
uine intellectual constructions, as truly
creations of the mind of the scientist as a
national policy or an epic poem are crea-
tions of the mind of statesman or poet. In
order to bring out the importance of this
fundamental insight of Kant's we must
at this juncture advert to certain considera-
tions which digress slightly from the main
line of our thought.

INTRODUCTION 23

Every view or conception of the world,
including, of course, the mechanical, which
pretends to be universal in its scope, must
furnish explanation for its own existence
as a system of thought. For the human
thinker and his thought are a part of the
real world and one who would explain the
universe in terms of mechanism must find
mechanical causes and processes able to
account for them both. Now if, for the
moment, the graver difficulty be ignored
of introducing consciousness into the sys-
tem of physical energy, we may admit
that we should have at least the semblance
of a mechanical explanation of thinking
if we could conceive of, say, scientific
generalization as the accumulation of im-
pressions of a certain kind, made upon
the mind by a particular object or set of
objects, event or sequence of events, which
repeatedly stimulated the sense-organs.
Thus we should have at least the sugges-
tion of an explanation of thinking in terms
of natural causation. Now, this is the

24 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

way in which many persons, and frequently
the scientific investigators themselves who
are actively engaged in the process, tend
to understand scientific induction. From
the observation of similar instances and
an accumulation of particular facts, the
generalization is supposed to arise by a
kind of natural law. Bacon, the reputed
founder of the inductive method, may
seem occasionally to give sanction to this
view, but Galileo had a more adequate
understanding of the process. The truth
is that a scientific induction is a creation
of active intelligence: the laws induced
are not conscious reflections of the total
effect of many external agencies working
upon the sense-organs, they are in a true
sense original constructions of the mind
itseK. Working on the basis of observed
fact, the scientific investigator by the
exercise of his constructive imagination
formulates an hypothesis, and this he is
able to do because of the power his mind
possesses of projecting motions and con-

INTRODUCTION 25

ceiving relations in pure space, indepen-
dent of actual observation. The hypothesis
once constructed, the intelUgence of the
originator, guided by its intuitive grasp of
the logic of space and of meaning, proceeds
to deduce the particular consequences which
will follow in fact if the hypothesis is true.
In this fashion all the great inductions of
modern science, those of Copernicus and
Kepler, of GaHleo and Newton and Dar-
win, have arisen; as such they are standing
refutations of the mechanical conception of
the universe.

Kant rendered modern thought a high
service, therefore, when he showed that
the laws of natural science are intellectual
constructions, that mathematics and physics
in particular are not assemblages of facts
but elaborately wrought-out conceptual sys-
tems. But, we are tempted at once to
ask, do we not, when we thus speak of
the laws of nature as constructions of
imaginative intelligence, neglect their dis-
tinguishing feature, their outstanding char-

26 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

acteristic? We are familiar with the prod-
ucts of the imagination in other fields.
The novelist, for example, through the
exercise of his imagination creates a group
of characters, fills in every important de-
tail of their appearance, dress, and situa-
tion, records every significant act and in-
cident of their life histories, and all with
such consistency and lifelikeness that we
say his story is truer than fact. For all
that, because the story is a work of imag-
ination and not a narration of actual oc-
currences, we assign it to the realm of fic-
tion rather than the domain of fact. On
the other hand, is not the salient feature
of a scientific law its standing as objective
fact, in diametrical opposition to all that
is subjective and fictitious .^^ Does it not
express a uniformity in the operation of
real forces, an underlying uniformity and
hence a basal fact? The question arises,
then, how such a generalization, admittedly
the creation of human intelligence, ac-
quires the standing of objective fact. This

INTRODUCTION 27

was Kant's great problem. His solution
was that such principles and products of
our thinking gain objectivity from the
work they do in making more orderly,
more harmonious, more unified, the world
of our common human experience. For,
he held, the difference between the objec-
tive world and any realm of fiction or of
fancy is that the elements of the former
are so bound together in fixed order and
relationship as to constitute one system,
the same for all human minds.

Kant's answer is undoubtedly true as
far as it goes, profoundly and indubitably
true. Many of the products of our think-
ing, generalizations of intelligence or con-
structions of the imagination as they may
be called, do acquire the standing of ob-
jective fact in just this way: they agree
with, and correlate, a number of different
instances; they harmonize many discrepant
and conflicting facts; they unify and re-
duce to system a mass of unrelated and
hence bewildering data. This is what oc-

28 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

curs in the every-day life of all of us.
Suppose that I enter my classroom one
morning and instead of the order, neatness,
and warmth which I expected to find, am
disconcerted to feel a rushing draft of cold
air, to see a jagged hole in an upper win-
dow-pane, and to observe muddy foot-
prints on the floor. For the moment, I
stand perplexed, trying to imagine some
explanation. Then I remember that I
saw some boys engaged in a ball game
just outside the window on the previous
afternoon, and wonder if their ball did the
damage. I notice that the window broken
is on the side of the room toward their
playground, that the hole in the glass is
about the size a ball would make, and that
the mud or dust upon the floor is such as
they would leave if they had entered and
searched the room for their ball. I there-
upon accept my hypothesis as true in
fact, and do so because it agrees with and
correlates all the data present to my senses.
When I adopt such an hypothesis as

INTRODUCTION 29

truth, moreover, it does not remain some-
thing distinct from and added to the
empirical facts; it merges with and be-
comes part of these facts. The broken
window now becomes the window broken
by the ball, and the muddy footmarks
the footmarks of the boys. Thus do
fact and theory merge in the constitution
of our real world. In exactly the same
way are many scientiiBc postulates verified:
they are accepted as true because, better
than any other beliefs, they agree with
the many variant and apparently conflict-
ing facts in a certain field, and reduce
them to order and system. On this ground
the theory of evolution has been accepted
by scientists: it was Darwin's achievement
to have assembled the facts and then to
have shown that the evolutionary hypoth-
esis was the only generalization sufficiently
comprehensive to correlate them all.

Kant then discovered one of the ways
in which our intellectual constructions are
verified and given standing as facts. But

30 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

this was, after all, but one method of veri-
fication and hence furnished only a partial
solution of the problem. And when a
partial truth is taken for the whole, in
any field, the outcome is bound to be
serious error. This is what occurred in
the development of Kant's philosophy,
and particularly in the thought of his
immediate successors of the German ideal-
istic school. Kant made it plain that the
laws of natural science are hypotheses
which owe their objective reality to the
work they do — ^but this work, as he thought,
was wholly intellectual, the organization
of the data of experience into an ideal,
a conceptual, system. Now his followers
Fichte, Schelling, and particularly Hegel,
went on, as they believed, to develop the
logical implications of his standpoint. Since
the work of thought is thus to organize
the data of experience, the ultimate aim
of all thinking, or Truth, is necessarily a
completed intellectual system, a system of
ideas which shall comprehend and make

INTRODUCTION 31

place for every detail of experience. Since,
furthermore, our thought gains objectivity-
according as it furthers the organization
of conscious experience, it follows, so these
thinkers maintained, that a completed in-
tellectual synthesis, such as we understand
Truth to be, is also identical with the
fullest, the most complete Reality. Now,
it is obvious that such an ideal unity has
been achieved in no human experience,
and if we believe, as the successors of
Kant did believe, that the existence of
such a completely organized experience is
implied in the efforts of our intelligence to
organize the data of our experience, we
must suppose that it takes the form of
a superhuman experience, an Absolute
Thought, in which all the details of our
conscious lives, fragmentary and conflict-
ing as they appear to be, are comprehended
and reconciled. And, as by the exercise
of our thought we continue to unify and
systematize the details of our limited ex-
perience, in an increasing degree we partic-

32 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

ipate in the Absolute Experience and share
its perfect reahty.

In this way Kant's theory of knowl-
edge was transformed into an intellec-
tualistic philosophy. For it is plainly a
consequence of this reasoning that man as
a finite being attains fuller reahty not by
endeavor of action to transform the ac-
tual conditions of his existence, but by
eflFort of thought to see things as they are,
all comprehended and reconciled within
the one absolute system. This position,
once taken, has further consequences re-
pugnant to our moral consciousness — con-
sequences which led finally to the rejection
of absolute idealism and, unfortunately,
to the partial discrediting of the Kantian
principles underlying it. If reality attaches
only to that which is embraced within
the unity of the Absolute Experience,
what becomes of the inconsistencies, the
discordant and conflicting features of our
human experiences^ They must be re-
garded as apparent, not real, as illusions

INTRODUCTION 33

due to our imperfect understanding, cer-
tain to disappear when we attain the
larger vision. The difficulties in such a view
come home to us with special force in two
vitally important connections. In the first
place, the independence and initiative of
individual human wills seem to violate
that perfected unity of the absolute thought
and to produce persistent opposition and
open conflict in the world of real fact.
Secondly, evil seems to be rooted in a
radical maladjustment in the nature of
things. Now, the absolute idealist, if true
to his principle, is bound to regard both
human freedom and the different forms of
evil as illusory and unreal: in so far as
the human individual attains reahty, he
is merged in the Absolute Experience, and
to such a one, who sees things as they are,
all that appears to be evil proves to be a
means to a larger good. Such a view dis-
courages effort and belittles moral struggle;
it is repugnant to the conscience of the
modern world.

34 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

Thus a check was given to the growth
of a new humanism existing in germ in
the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, a hu-
manism which sees the laws of natural
science in their true character as working
hypotheses, as plans for human action ac-
cepted on faith and tested by the help
they give man in enlarging the sphere of
his conscious control. Kant himself as-
sisted in concealing these humanistic im-
pHcations of his thought when he made
the test of these working principles exclu-
sively intellectual. This led his successors
finally to conceive of them as principles
resident in the world for thought to dis-
cover rather than as tools or instruments
employed by man's will in its effort to
control and transform the world, tested
by the aid they supply in this undertaking,
and replaced by other principles when
these prove more efficient. To conceive
of the laws of nature as uniformities of
relation required to maintain the coher-
ence and completeness of the Absolute

INTRODUCTION 35

Thought IS to substitute for a physical,
a logical, determinism, just as fatal to
man's freedom and opportunity for per-
sonal development as the most thorough-
going materialism.

Further knowledge, both of the inter-
dependence of thought and action and of
scientific methods of verification, was re-
quired before the momentous consequences
of Kant's Copernican change of position
in philosophy could be rightly understood
and appreciated. Nearly a century elapsed
before this knowledge had been gained,
and it remained for an American school
of philosophy to prove conclusively that
all belief, in science as well as in religion,
depended upon practice for its verification.
The genius of WiUiam James, co-operating
with the incisive thought of John Dewey,
developed a doctrine well known as Prag-
matism, which is destined to stand as a
permanent contribution to the solution of
philosophic problems. Two facts deeply
impressed the minds of these original prag-

36 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

matists and suggested their famous doc-
trine: the discovery by genetic psychology
that in organic evolution intelligence has
been developed as an aid to action, a means
of adjustment, and the general recognition
by working scientists that their so-called
laws are not transcriptions of reality but
man-made instruments whose use is to
correlate old facts and lead to new ones.
These and other facts seemed to the found-
ers of pragmatism to justify the general
conclusion that the test of truth is always
success in practice, that those ideas are
true which, when acted upon, lead us to
the results we expect and desire. Other
verification than this, they maintained,
there is none: there is no significant dif-
ference for thought which does not make
a difference in action. A practical dif-
ficulty, a situation to which no habitual
response is adequate, furnishes the oc-
casion for thought; the solution of this
difficulty constitutes its validation. For
this doctrine that all thought takes the

INTRODUCTION 87

form of belief, which looks forward to the
results of action to be verified, the prag-
matists found ample confirmation in all
the leading departments of human ex-
perience: in the ordinary conduct of daily
life, in religious faith, in scientific pro-
cedure. The truth of my belief that this
road leads to the lake is ascertained by
walking down it and observing where it
comes out. The truth of my belief that
this fabric is fast color is found out when,
on wearing it, I expose it to the sun and
rain. In religion, whose hypotheses are not
subject to the usual tests of experience,
beliefs are tested by their effects (primarily
emotional) upon the mind of the believer:
do they give him the hope and courage to
struggle on in pursuit of his ideals, or the
resignation and fortitude required to en-
able him to endure his trials and disap-
pointments? By their "fruits," not by
their "roots" we should know them, said
James of religious beliefs. In science the
true theory is the theory which enables

38 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

the investigator to predict what will happen
when, under laboratory conditions, natural
processes are allowed to take their course.
The belief that water is composed of two
parts hydrogen and one part oxygen is
verified when in the chemical laboratory
a combination of these elements in this
proportion is observed to result in the
familiar substance.

The doctrine of pragmatism made an
instant appeal to popular intelligence — in
particular to minds which were seeking a
new basis for religious faith in the world
of modern science. The popular vogue
of pragmatism was largely due to the sim-
plicity, the clearness, and the practicality
of its cardinal principle, presenting such a
striking contrast to the labored argument
and technical subtlety of traditional meta-
physics. But, as the case is bound to be
with apparently simple, sun-clear, and open-
air philosophies, when pragmatism was
interpreted, amended, and elaborated to
meet a flood of hostile criticism it became

INTRODUCTION 3d

as complicated and abstruse as any highly
wrought product of the philosopher's study.
Two of the criticisms directed against the
pragmatist doctrine have especial interest
for us: one concerns the fields in which
ideas "work"; the other has to do with
the character of the result which gives
verification to our ideas when they are
acted upon. With reference to the first
point critics at once maintained, and the
pragmatists acknowledged the force of their
argument, that ideas work intellectually
as well as in the field of action. One of
the leading functions of ideas is to correlate
other ideas; beliefs and conceptions are
accepted as true because they reduce to
order and system many previous judg-
ments which, as they stand, are not merely
diflFerent but contradictory. On these
grounds, as we have seen in reviewing
Kant's theory, many of the generalizations
of natural science are adopted as true.
In its original statement, indeed, prag-
matism tended to be as one-sided in its

40 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

emphasis upon the adjustment of acts as
the Kantian theory was in its preoccupa-
tion with intellectual synthesis. Upon
the second point, hostile criticism main-
tained that the outcome which was sup-
posed by pragmatism to establish the
truth of the belief which guided the action
could not be the pleasure or satisfaction
of the individual agent, nor even his ma-
terial comfort and prosperity; for these
results are frequently obtained by in-
dividuals who are acting upon beliefs gen-
erally admitted to be false, while con-
versely many an idea which the experience
of humanity proves to be true has brought
to the individual who acted under its
guidance only disappointment and poverty
and misery. Many persons, for instance,
have achieved material prosperity, have
accumulated fortunes, by acting upon the
belief that every man has his price and
that one must outwit his fellows if he does
not wish to have them outwit him — but
such results do not prove the truth of the

INTRODUCTION 41

belief in question. No, the true idea is
the idea which works "in the long run,"
and when we take the long run into con-
sideration we have to acknowledge the
underlying identity of all human interests
and say that truth belongs to those be-
liefs which, when taken for guides of ac-
tion, contribute to the ultimate good of
humanity. This pragmatists have been
loath to admit, but it is impossible to
see how, if they do not, their theory of
knowledge escapes individualism and sub-
jectivism. Unless amended in some such
way, it is little better than the teachings
of the ancient Sophists; it makes such be-
hefs true as the individual finds it advan-
tageous to hold.

It is evident, therefore, that if practical
success be adopted as the criterion of
truth, practice cannot be understood as
meaning mere outward action, the ad-
justment of the living individual to his
natural environment. It must be inter-
preted in a larger sense as identical with

42 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

all voluntary action, all purposive activity.
If it is thus understood there is no con-
ceivable ground for excluding the fields
of thought and emotion from its territory:
surely both intellectual and aesthetic ac-
tivity may be purposive, voluntary; truth
and beauty may be ends sought by will,
as well as prosperity and efficiency. It
must be identified with the satisfaction
of human personahty in its universal as-
pect. It means the realization of the
personal capacities of every human in-
dividual, means the fullest personal de-
velopment of humanity. To such a prag-
matism as this the ethical idealist should
have no objection: to be sure, it sub-
ordinates truth to the ultimate moral
purpose of the world, but such purpose
the idealist takes to be the ground of all
existence whatsoever.

This new humanism which modern phi-
losophy offers us, able to restore our con-
fidence in the powers of personality so
badly shaken by the great wave of nat-

INTRODUCTION 43

uralism which followed the extension of
the scientific world- view, is thus a synthesis
of critical idealism and pragmatism. It
recognizes toill as fundamental to human
personality, as the root of human activity,
the source of human progress. Thought,
then, is a particular expression, a special-
ized function of will. All ideas are orig-
inally programmes of action which look
forward to conduct for fulfilment and
realization. Hence all beliefs are orig-
inally postulates, and faith is prior to
fact; for ideas must first be adopted and
acted upon before they can be estabUshed
as facts. The fields of conduct in which
ideas are thus tested are those of thought
itself, of action, and of feeling; in these
three departments of his life, intellectual,
technical, and aesthetic, man is pursuing
his personal ideals and, through the out-
come of this activity, is receiving the
judgment of reality upon his beliefs. The
result which certifies the truth of a belief
is the same in these three fields of prac-

44 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

tice — extension of the sphere of man's
conscious control, enlargement of the con-
tent of his personal life.

Such is the view which underlies the in-
terpretation of human progress to be given
in these lectures. The types of belief, or
forms of faith, both scientific and relig-
ious, which characterize each of the main
stages in man's social evolution will be
considered in their relations of dependence
and development. Thus we shall permit
the course of progress itself to speak con-
cerning the validity of the great determin-
ing beliefs of human history. But before
beginning this survey, we must pause for
a brief consideration of the nature and
workings of the human will, the source
of man's personal power, and of his social
progress.

CHAPTER I

THE WILL AS THE TRUE SOURCE OF
HUMAN PROGRESS

Will is an activity which, Hke Hfe itself,
IS so pervasive, so many-sided, so incalcu-
lable, as to resist definition, since to define
we must make distinctions and set limits.
In attempts to characterize will, one is
most likely to err through emphasizing
one of its two leading aspects at the ex-
pense of the other. Some investigators
concern themselves altogether with the
influence of will upon outward action;
they conceive it as a control or co-ordina-
tion of bodily movement. This concep-
tion of volition primarily in terms of
organic behavior suggests an explanation
of voluntary action in terms of mechanical
causation, and leads to a neglect of that

45

46 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

other most notable and distinctive feature
of volition, the ability to choose between
ends and to originate courses of activity.
Absorption in this second, the "spiritual"
side of voluntary activity leads, on its
part, to a conception of the will equally
abstract. Impressed by the fact that will
is free from the shackles of natural causa-
tion, that its activities are in some sense
self-caused, moralists have often been led
to an empty and negative conception of
will, as essentially characterized by its
lack of any determination whatsoever.

If we would understand the character
of will as an actually existing power of
human nature, we must for the moment
turn away both from the principles of
biology and the metaphysics of freedom,
and look directly at it as it operates in the
conduct of man, both in the evolution of
human society and in our own choices
and pursuits. This we shall, of course,
be doing when we review the principal
stages in man's social development, but

THE WILL 47

a preliminary statement will be useful in
clearing the ground for this survey. When
we thus look directly at the workings of
will in our experience we find it acting in
two capacities. We find, first, that it is a
factor in the physical world of bodies and
of motion, that it directs the movements
of the physical organism which it inhabits,
and in consequence determines the move-
ments of other bodies both living and
non-living. Through the instrumentality
of his physical organism, man combines
the materials and harnesses the forces of
nature: thus he builds habitations and
conveyances, fashions tools and weapons,
constructs machines; he also assembles
other human individuals for purposes of
intercourse, industry, war, and govern-
ment. But all these actions he performs
as a means to the attainment of ends,
that is, personal satisfactions. Thus we
find will acting in a second capacity quite
different from the first: that of choosing
between different objects in accordance

48 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

with their value as ends. Now, these ob-
jects which are chosen as sources of per-
sonal satisfaction diflfer in many ways, no-
tably in their degree of comprehensiveness.
Some are specific and temporary, such
as an article of food desired at any partic-
ular moment; others are more general and
lasting, such as wealth or family prestige;
others are still more inclusive, such as
national welfare or the knowledge of truth.
But whenever will is exercised continuously
and is thus given opportunity for self-
expression, we find it selecting and seeking
the most comprehensive ends, those ends
which include the largest number of par-
ticular satisfactions and promise to pro-
duce the fullest and richest personal life.
Thus, will, viewed in the light of human
history and experience, appears as a power
constantly striving so to control the forces
of nature and to adjust the tendencies of
social life as to bring about the most com-
prehensive satisfaction of human personal-
ity.

THE WILL 49

When we consider the abilities which
are prerequisite to the operation of will,
a voluntary action seems a notable achieve-
ment. So, in fact, it is; among living
creatures only man is, as far as we know,
capable of volition. Yet any child of three
or four years, of suflScient mental develop-
ment to have a desire and to seek its ful-
filment, possesses this power. Indeed, a
simple act of volition, such as any child is
capable of, may illustrate in an effective
way the different factors which co-operate
in all voluntary activity.

Suppose that a child of four, tired of
play outdoors, comes into the house. The
room which he enters contains familiar
toys which excite the play impulse in him,
and packages as yet unopened which
awaken his instinctive curiosity. This
pressure of instinct and impulse he is
able to resist, however, because a definite
desire has seized him. In obedience to
this desire he, disregarding everything else,
walks straight across the room to his

50 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

mother's side and asks her to tell him a
story, a new story with soldiers in it (for
he has just seen soldiers passing). When
she demurs he continues to urge; finally,
he gains her consent and sits down satis-
fied by the prospect of the coming tale.

In such a case of action from desire we
have a simple instance of that voluntary
activity which is the root and source of
all personal life. For the child who thus
acts from conscious desire refuses longer
to permit nature, in the form of inborn
instinct and involuntary impulse, to act
through him; he asserts his right as a free
being to determine his own action as his
intelligence approves. Now, even in our
example, which illustrates will at the earliest
stage of its development and consequently
in its simplest form, we can distinguish
in the operation of willing or volition
three factors.

The first of these is thought and imagina'
tion. The boy imagines his mother telUng
hini a story, and this, his idea of something

THE WILL 51

which does not yet exist, sets itself in
sharp contrast to objects actually present
to his senses, such as toys or books. Un-
less the human individual is able to con-
ceive or imagine objects not yet existent,
he will be unable through his own initiative
to realize such objects. The idea itself,
the imagined story-telling, that is, is the
outcome of previous experience, of mem-
ories of stories asked for, told, and enjoyed.
But in thought past experience is not
merely revived and opposed to present
fact; it is taken to pieces, altered, re-
combined. Thus, the story asked for
need not be identical with the one last
told, but may be a new one whose sub-
ject had been suggested by that day's
play. Thought, reinterpreting rather than
reproducing past experience, gives expres-
sion to the unitary self or personality
which is developing throughout the course
of such experience.

The second factor is feeling. Because
he has enjoyed the stories told him in the

52 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

past the child finds the idea of Hstening
to a story very pleasant. But while the
story told him remains merely an idea, it
conflicts with the actual facts. This con-
flict between what is wished for and what
actually exists produces strain and tension
in the child's consciousness, which is felt
as painful. When he wins the desired con-
sent, however, and the story begins, he
feels pleasure in ''getting his wish," thus
removing from his mind the conflict be-
tween idea and actual fact. Feeling re-
flects the effect upon the self of seeking
and attaining new objects.

Action is the third factor. Moved by
the idea of the story which he desires but
does not hear, the child takes steps which,
he believes, will bring the longed-for result.
He intercedes with his mother in the
manner which promises to be most effec-
tive, meeting objections with the best re-
plies he can devise, until at last the result
is gained. In action, the individual grap-
ples with the actual situation, and so

THE WILL 53

transforms it as to provide for the realiza-
tion of his idea.

But while thought, feeling, and action
are all essential to the operation of voli-
tion, in none of them do we find its essen-
tial quality revealed. No one of them
may be said to determine the will; for,
in the first place, volition is more than
the execution of a programme thought
out beforehand in every detail. It is
impossible through thought to foresee the
actual course of events at every point.
No amount of thinking — even if he pos-
sessed all the wisdom of his elders — would
assure the boy of our illustration of his
mother's consent, or anticipate her every
objection. Then, secondly, volition is more
than the resultant of feelings produced by
past experience . and influencing present
conduct, for the pleasures of the past
have all of them arisen from special situa-
tions, and the past guarantees their repeti-
tion only when the situation itself is re-
produced. But our wills are always facing

54 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

new situations whose pleasure-giving pos-
sibilities are uncertain. If it is not a new
story that the child wishes for, it is an old
story on a new occasion and the enjoy-
ment it will furnish can only be ascer-
tained by trying it. Finally, volition is
more than the outcome of action. To
attain such result as the circumstances
permit, in the most skilful manner pos-
sible, is not to exercise volition. A result
must be gained in order to satisfy the will,
surely — ^but it must be such a result as
appeals to the doer because of his own
personal experience and, for this reason,
such a result as satisfies himself. To be
able to persuade his mother to tell the
story will not satisfy the will of the boy
unless, because of his own experience, he
has come to enjoy story-telling.

The true nature of will is revealed only
when we understand it as embracing
thought, feeling, and action equally, not
merely assembled as parts, but merged by
their co-operation into a vital unity. We

THE WILL 55

discover the essential quality of volition
when we think of it as an activity which
is ever striving, through a variety of chosen
objects, toward a general end or result,
and this result is self-expansion, the ex-
pansion of the boundaries of conscious
Kfe until it shall include and assimilate
everything that is real. Will is, therefore,
the cause of all our human development,
being both the demand which we as in-
telUgent persons make for more life and
a larger world and also the power to at-
tain such life and to realize such a world.
Subjectively, it manifests itself as the
capacity for faith, belief in the ability of
conscious personality ultimately to master
and absorb all that exists, and thus gain
for itself permanence and reality. Such
faith does not contradict reason or dis-
regard fact; it is based upon reason and
utiUzes such facts as a rational interpre-
tation of past experience furnishes. But
it refuses to be limited by past experience;
it proposes to discover new facts that

56 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

shall enlarge the scope and enrich the
content of personal life. Objectively, it
appears as the ability to venture, the will-
ingness to abandon objects already at-
tained and proved satisfactory for the
sake of other objects as yet unattained
and uncertain, which promise larger pos-
sibilities of satisfaction. This venturing
is not the foolhardiness which contemp-
tuously flings aside hard-won and certain
goods in the pursuit of objects whose
promises are alluring but deceptive; it is
rather that true courage which dares to
jeopardize the limited although secure satis-
faction of the present in a deliberate and
strenuous attempt to attain new objects
which, in the larger life they involve, make
permanent place for, and impart new signif-
icance to, the satisfactions at the time sur-
rendered. Even in our trivial instance we
find the essential character of vohtion il-
lustrated. The child resists the appeal
of surrounding objects to his senses and
asks for a story because his germinating

THE WILL 57

personality demands expansion in an ob-
ject which shall express himself. He shows
faith, for he believes in what no wisdom,
human or divine, could predict for a cer-
tainty— that his mother can be persuaded
to tell the story. He is able to venture,
for he gives up the assured pleasure which
his toys would furnish in order to seek an
object which, although it contained larger
possibilities of self-satisfaction, was at the
time remote and uncertain.

It is this activity of volition, maintain-
ing faith in the power and permanence of
personality, and daring to venture for the
sake of a fuller life and a larger world,
which is the true cause of all man's prog-
ress. In the pages which follow we shall
see it determining the successive stages
of human development.

"We cannot kindle when we will
The fire which in the heart resides;
The spirit bloweth and is still,
In mystery our soul abides.

But tasks in hours of insight will'd
Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.

58 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

"With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish 'twere done.
Not till the hours of light return.
All we have built do we discern."

(^Arnold: *' Morality,")

CHAPTER II
THE PRIMITIVE LIFE

The simplest and lowest type of human
life is that absorbed in the gratification of
momentary desire. At the dawn of its
development man's will finds expression
in the pursuit of objects which attract
it by the pleasure they promise at the
very moment. This type of life, given
over to the pursuit of present pleasure,
may therefore be taken as the initial step
in human progress.

In thus distinguishing a kind of human
life entirely given to the gratification
of present desire, we are by no means
asserting that men or groups of men have
ever lived so preoccupied with present
pleasure as never in the whole course
of their existence to have had a single
thought for the future or its hazards.
This may well be doubted, for the instinct

59

60 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

of self-preservation would prompt men to
seek escape from future pain as soon as
the first ray of self-conscious intelligence
had appeared. But it is also true that
races or tribes of men do exist and have
existed whose life is, in the main, a pursuit
of the objects of momentary desire. With
the advance of civilization such groups
become rarer; their life is of necessity
savage and nomadic, and possible only
.under exceptionally favorable conditions.
These conditions are actually realized in
some equatorial regions and tropical isles
where neither clothing nor shelter is re-
quired for the preservation of existence,
and abundance of food is ready at hand.
So situated, men can live and do live
without serious thought for the morrow,
absorbed in the enjoyment now of food,
now of play, now of rest, now of com-
panionship, combat, and sexual or parental
love. Then, among more civilized peoples
are individuals whose lives rarely rise
above this first low plane of attainment —

THE PRIMITIVE LIFE 61

only here the social environment does not
usually permit the uninterrupted indul-
gence of present desire, even if it were
otherwise possible. We all know of in-
dividuals whose momentary desires are so
strong and whose power of realizing future
consequences is so weak that they are
unable for long to keep out of the clutches
of the law. Still further, even among the
most civilized of men, persons whose lives
are for the most part thoroughly regulated
have periods of moral relaxation in which
they seem incapable of doing more than
following momentary impulse: we all de-
mand, as William James puts it, our
"moral holidays." This type of life, de-
voted to the quest of present pleasure,
constitutes the beginning of man's de-
velopment away from the animal with its
blind instincts and dumb stirrings; it is
in truth the primitive human life.

Man's first movements in pursuit of ob-
jects are not the result of his conscious

62 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

choice; in truth, they do not come from
his will at all. These movements have
their source in the mechanism of the hu-
man body. Man is born with certain
paths of connection already established in
his nervous system. These established
nervous connections cause him to react
with definite sequences of movement when
his sense-organs are stimulated in certain
ways. They are called instincts, and it is
instinct which leads the human individual
first to eat, to sleep, to play, to talk, to
imitate, to resent. Instinct operates me-
chanically, as a bell rings when the button
is pressed. Sometimes it is an article of
food which, when visible, presses the button;
the ringing which follows takes the form
of movements to grasp, to bite, to swallow.
Sometimes it is the sound of an approach-
ing enemy which presses the button; then
the ringing of the bell consists in the move-
ments of limbs requisite to speedy flight.
Or it may be that by the look or voice of
another human being the button is pressed;

THE PRIMITIVE LIFE 63

then the movements of play or of combat
or of imitation constitute the response.
But although instinctive movements have
no conscious motives, they are accompanied
by consciousness: the individual who re-
acts feels the exertion of moving to secure
the object, and the pleasure of possessing
it. Such experiences of movement and
resulting pleasure associate themselves in
memory with the sensations that orig-
inally came from the object and stimulated
the movement. The result of the associa-
tion is an idea of the object as an end of
action, that is, a source of satisfaction.
Thus in the early stage of his mental de-
velopment man comes to have ideas of
different classes of objects that appeal
to his various instincts. The world into
which human intelligence awakens con-
tains, therefore, many kinds of objects
that are interesting, that possess value
because they promise enjoyment when
attained. These attractive objects fall
into two large groups. There are inan-

64 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

imate objects, such as food and drink and
coverings, which appeal to the instincts of
food and shelter and curiosity. Besides
these are living beings which arouse such
instincts as those of sex, of companion-
ship, of play, and of combat.

Here, then, we find the true beginnings
of the life of voluntary achievement. Upon
these objects of natural instinct, become
ends of conscious desire, the human will
is directed: in pursuing and appropriat-
ing them volition achieves the first step
in self-expansion.

Man's power of will is originally mani-
fested, then, in seeking the object which he
at the moment desires to obtain — the fruit
on the neighboring tree, the companion-
ship of a fellow, the refreshing coolness of
a plunge in the stream, the smile or caress
of a maiden, the view from the distant
hilltop. Looked back upon from the van-
tage-point of later development, such in-
dulgence of momentary desire seems sim-
ple and easy enough: the only effort which

THE PRIMITIVE LIFE 65

civilized man exerts in connection with
momentary desire is that required to re-
sist its inherent impulsion and to restrain
it in the interest of future well-being.
From this superior standpoint it may
seem absurd to regard the gratification
of passing desire as an achievement of
spirit, a triumph of personality. Why,
it may be asked, is faith required to yield
to the urgency of present impulse, where
is the element of venture in seizing and
enjoying what one happens at the time to
want? But faith and venture are both of
them present, nevertheless; desire is a
genuine expression of will and these fea-
tures are inevitable accompaniments of
volition. Faith is present because the
fulfilment of simple desire involves belief
in the reality of the ideal. The object of
desire does not exist except as an idea in
the mind of the actor, yet his belief in the
reality of his idea is strong enough to
cause him to disregard all other things
actually surrounding him and to expend

66 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

effort in seeking this ideal object. Faith
is exercised even when the object desired
is not merely imagined (as is frequently
the case), but is actually present to the
senses, tempting him with its alluring
qualities; for it is never the object as
present to the senses merely, which is
desired and sought: it is such a sense-
object conceived as an end, that is, thought
of as affording specific satisfactions. Thus,
when the savage desires the fruit he sees
hanging from the tree, it is not simply the
fruit which he perceives by sense of sight
that he desires, but the fruit which he
imagines as possessing certain pleasant
qualities — that, for instance, it is sweet to
the taste, cool and moistening to the
throat, appeasing to hunger, etc. To seek
an object of desire is also to venture. For
the outcome of the simplest activity under-
taken in response to desire is in some de-
gree uncertain. The object may fail to
possess the looked-for qualities, the agent
may prove incapable of enjoying them even

THE PRIMITIVE LIFE 67

if they are there, some unexpected event
may frustrate his endeavor. In such case
he will have expended effort in vain, he may
have missed beneficial influences from the
objects of his former environment, he may
have incurred exhausting fatigue or met
with injurious accident. Thus the savage
who climbs the tree after the desired fruit
may find it sour and unpalatable, or its
expected sweetness may prove unpleasant
and nauseating, or he may fail in his
eflFort to climb the tree, perhaps falling
and incurring injury. In such cases he
certainly will have expended energy fruit-
lessly (no light matter with him, it may be) ,
he may have missed the refreshing sleep
which the quiet and the shade would have
brought him had he remained lying in the
grass beneath, and it is possible that he
might be crippled by a fall.

Now it is just this faith, whether justi-
fied or not, which creates for man his first
world. For in the operation of momentary
desire a postulate is impHed. This post-

68 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

ulate, when explicitly stated, is that partic-
ular objects exist which, when attained, will
exhibit certain characteristic qualities. Such
belief is not the result of logical reasoning
(although accumulating experience may
make it increasingly probable); it is an
affirmation of will. But, although only a
postulate, it transforms a succession of
sensations into the consciousness of a
world of objects. It is, in fact, man's
will giving him a world. The contents of
this world are many and varied; its ob-
jects vary with diflferent races of men and
according as the natural environment of
these different groups varies. Yet there
is a limit to this variation; for all men
possess the same fundamental instincts
and consequently come to value the same
general sorts of objects. The objects in
question are both animate and inanimate.
In the latter class fall all the objects of
the physical environment which have a
bearing upon man's existence and comfort,
such as fruits and minerals, wells and

THE PRIMITIVE LIFE 69

streams, plains and mountains, sun, cloud,
and rain. To the former belong both
animals and men: the first thought of as
supplying food and clothing, the second
apprehended in the momentous social re-
lationships of sex, parenthood, and clan-
ship. The world which the human will
creates in its first grapple with the con-
ditions which confront it is thus a world
of different things which possess char-
acteristic qualities. These things are con-
ceived as centres of activity, as substances,
each displaying its own nature in distinc-
tive attributes — and, in their aggregate,
they constitute the primitive world.

Simple though the structure of this
primitive world may be, it is the product
of two different modes of thought: the
object which first confronts the human
will is really a combination of interpre-
tations made from two different points of
view. In the first place, the human in-
dividual who would act must apprehend
objects in terms of the bodily movements

70 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

required to approach (or avoid) them.
Thus objects are perceived to the right
and left, as high or low, as near or far, as
stationary or moving; they are located in
space. Now the movements which must
be made to obtain two different objects
are never, at any one time, just the same;
as we say, no two bodies can occupy the
same position in space at the same time.
Hence the perceived location of the single
object in space belongs to it alone and is
shared by no other. And since the move-
ments which two or more different in-
dividuals must make to obtain the same
objects are never just the same (two hu-
man bodies cannot occupy the same space
at the same time), the perception of ob-
jects as located in space is always, strictly
speaking, an individual matter. Yet for
small groups living in close proximity the
location of different objects is practically
the same. Their knowledge of the posi-
tion of the things that concern them is
in a large measure common knowledge:

THE PRIMITIVE LIFE 71

for all of them the neighboring hilltop is
high, the plain is wide, the ocean far toward
the setting sun; for all the region of game
is identical, the stream containing fish
runs in the same direction. But, in the
second place, the human being who chooses
objects for pursuit must conceive them
also in terms of the satisfactions they are
able to afford him. Thus he is led roughly
to classify objects according to their qual-
ities— ^berries and flesh as good to eat,
spring-water as clear and cool to drink,
the skins of animals as warm to wear.
Now, since the same satisfactions are fur-
nished by many different objects (many
kinds of food are edible, many kinds of
skins are warm and dry) they do not as
qualities belong, like location in space,
to particular objects only, but are com-
mon to many. They are universals, are
characteristics of classes of objects. Thus
every object that is sought as an end by
human volition unites both existence in
particular time and place and value in

72 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

the possession of certain desirable quali-
ties.

It follows that the action required to
obtain the object of will in the first stage
of its development is peculiar to the in-
dividual. To go to drink from the spring
near by requires a different combination
of bodily movements from every member
of the clan. These movements cannot be
described in general terms (not completely
by our modern science and scarcely at all
by primitive thought). They can, how-
ever, be imitated, and when to such imita-
tion is added some elementary instruction
through the medium of language, action
begins to be generalized and standardized.
Thus the clan learns to hunt together, to
fight together, to build by common action
some rude shelter. The ends of action,
on the other hand, are in a measure com-
mon to different individuals from the start.
For much the same satisfactions are sought
by all men because their instinctive de-
sires are identical and the quality of fur-

THE PRIMITIVE LIFE 73

nishing such satisfaction belongs not to
single objects but to classes of objects.
Hence all the group may together seek
and enjoy food, obtaining it in diflferent
ways from different sources. When in
the development of language names are
given to these universal qualities and they
become the subject of discourse the founda-
tion of intelligent social life is laid. Thus
values are from the beginning social, and
the social consciousness is originally a
consciousness of value. This is a neces-
sary result of the fact that, while the cir-
cumstances of human existence vary end-
lessly, and the modes of human action
differ without limit, a unity of will underlies
all human life in consequence of which
men have common ends and desires.

The outcome of the activity which we
have been considering, wherein the human
individual seeks through his own bodily
effort to secure the object which he at
the moment desires, is a succession of en-
joyments. This is the case, providing, of

74 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

course, he is able to obtain the objects
which he seeks, that his actions are suc-
cessful in yielding the satisfaction sought
for. Now, it is not impossible that the
succession of desires should, for a consid-
erable time, gain fulfilment; for, as the
child who is favorably situated may live
a life of care-free delight or sunny enjoy-
ment, now playing, now eating, now rest-
ing, as it pleases him, so Nature may prove
an indulgent foster-parent, permitting her
human children to enjoy an almost un-
broken round of pleasure in the gratifica-
tion of succeeding desires. Feeling may,
therefore, be said to be the dominant factor
in the natural life of man: the will which
we have seen to be its source here strives
to secure and prolong present pleasure
and to escape the pain which momentarily
threatens. The pleasures sought and en-
joyed are not merely those which arise
from organic well-being and betterment,
however. These play an important part,
to be sure, but to them is added the plea-

THE PRIMITIVE LIFE 75

sure which comes from the successful at-
tainment of an object with which the will
of the individual has identified itself, from
the unimpeded exercise of the will itself.
Thus the savage, who obtains the game
which he hunts, enjoys not . merely the
beneficial effects of the food which it pro-
vides but also his own success in the hunt-
ing. The satisfaction which he gains is
not to be understood as simply a pleasant
feeling which tones the consciousness of
a living organism which has been affected
beneficially; it is a composite, a concrete
consciousness, a pleasure which results
from the successful appropriation of an
object which proves to have just those
qualities for which it was chosen and
sought. Indeed, it is possible for an action
momentarily detrimental to man's phys-
ical well-being, to yield pleasure when
attained, because his will has identified
itself with just this object. Thus a savage
might enjoy winning a race which he upon
impulse had run with a fellow despite the

76 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

fact he was suffering great momentary
pain in result of his unwonted exertions.

While it is possible that action from
momentary desire should bring an unbroken
succession of pleasures, it is exceedingly
improbable. The conditions of man's exis-
tence on this earth are such as to make it
practically impossible for him always to
succeed in obtaining what he at the mo-
ment desires. Objects fail to yield the
expected satisfactions: the well proves to
be dry, the fruit to be bitter, the game to
have migrated. Fellow humans fail to
exhibit the looked-for traits: the trusted
helper becomes the jealous rival, the ad-
miring companion becomes the scornful
critic, the friendly acquaintance becomes
the vengeful foe. And when the objects
sought after retain their pleasure-giving
qualities the forces of nature are liable at
any time unexpectedly to interfere and
frustrate all man's efforts to attain them.
In fact, the life absorbed in the pursuit of
present pleasure exists, when it exists at

THE PRIMITIVE LIFE 77

all, on suflferance of nature; the existence
of those peoples who live entirely in the
present and take little thought for the fu-
ture is notoriously precarious. The sword
hanging over their heads may have its
slender thread cut instantly by any one of
a score of perils, such as famine, pestilence,
storm, wild beasts, or human foes, and
the best that can be said for them is that
their death when it comes may be merci-
fully swift, sudden, and unexpected.

Just here, in this thwarting of man's
will in its efforts to secure the object which
at the moment appeals to it, enters evily
the tragic feature in human life. Under
the head of evil is included all the influ-
ences and tendencies arising out of the
actual conditions of human life that hin-
der or frustrate man's will in its efforts
at self -expansion. In the very first stage
of human progress, when man's will ex-
presses itself in effort to gratify present
desire, evil is present unmistakably and
ominously in its two characteristic forms.

78 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

It appears, first, as the failure of physical
forces and objects to meet human expec-
tations and to fulfil human needs. Sec-
ondly, it appears as the failure of other
human beings to afford the satisfactions
which the individual's social instincts cause
him to expect from them, and this because
they as individuals have desires of their
own which they are seeking to gratify.
The will of the human individual comes
inevitably into conflict, first, with the forces
of nature, second, with other human wills:
in the first conflict consists natural or phys-
ical, in the second, moral or social evil.

It would appear, then, that man's world
fails from the beginning to justify the
faith he has put in it. Accepted modes of
action do not result in the attainment of
the desired object as was expected, and
objects when attained do not manifest
the quahties ascribed to them. How does
the will react to this emergency.^ By sur-
rendering its faith and sinking back into
the quiescence of discouragement and de-

THE PRIMITIVE LIFE 79

spair ? Not at all ! Volition's response is
characteristic of its dauntless courage, its
inexhaustible resource. To this crisis it
responds with another beUef more venture-
some and far-reaching than the first. It
assumes that the objects of desire are con-
trolled by superhuman spirits who are
susceptible to its influence, responsive to
its appeal. The will of man proposes to
insure itself of the satisfaction which it
seeks by winning the favor and enlisting
the strength of the spirits who control
the objects of its desires. Thus the savage
believes that the spring gone dry can be
made to gush forth water if by prayer,
adulation, or sacrifice he can gain the
ear and secure the assistance of its pre-
siding divinity. Hence he is led to take
the measures which seem to be required
in the way of rehgious rite and ceremony
to insure himself of success in the hunt,
victory in the fight, children in marriage.

At this juncture, then, we behold relig-
ion entering the world of human experi-

80 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

ence — ^religion, a factor of determining im-
portance in man's life, an essential feature
in his progress. In its earliest and simplest
form religious faith consists in belief in
the existence of agencies possessing more
power than man possesses, because they
are able to control actual objects and forces
in a way that he cannot, and also having
personality since they are capable of under-
standing man's petitions and sympathizing
with his desires and acting to fulfil his
needs. The gods are, therefore, from the
beginning conceived as spirits. With the
origin of man's belief in spirits, invisible
personal agents, we are not here concerned.
Probably a number of influences con-
tributed to the formation of this belief.
But these spirits become objects of relig-
ious faith only when they are controlling
factors in conduct, when they are utilized
as instrumentalities by volition in the
achievement of its ends. Then the gods
become man's helpers and protectors, co-
operating with his will in its eflFort to en-

THE PRIMITIVE LIFE 81

large the scope of his personaUty by giv-
ing him control over physical objects
and forces, and over the psychical states
of himself and his fellow men. The at-
tribute of divinity most prominent in the
infancy of religion is undoubtedly power.
The gods are necessarily many, since the
objects which affect, favorably or unfavor-
ably, the fulfilment of man's desires are
many and diverse. There are gods of the
forest and the stream, of the mountain
and the storm, of the fight and the hunt,
of feasting and procreation. These divin-
ities may be imagined in the forms of
familiar animals but they always pos-
sess personal powers not attributed to any
animal. Since, moreover, human desires
have source in instincts common to all
men, and the primitive group or clan seeks
to gratify these desires in a common nat-
ural environment, the same divinities an-
swer for the whole group. Religion is,
therefore, a social institution from the.
start. As the gods possess the essential

82 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

attributes of personality the methods of
persuading, beguiling, and (occasionally)
threatening them are identical with those
used in dealing with fellow men. Petitions
are addressed to them, they are eulogized
and cajoled, gifts are presented, bribes
are oflFered, bargains are made. Since
they are gods of the whole group, and the
objects they control are desired by all
and frequently sought by common efiFort,
their worship tends to become a social
ceremony and a symbol of group unity.

Even with the reinforcement of religious
belief the effort of man's will to obtain
satisfaction through the pursuit of the
objects of momentary desire is doomed to
failure. It may be diflBcult to understand
how religion in this crude form could give
any real assistance. How, may we ask,
could man ever so deceive himself as to
believe that his prayers and sacrifices
would bring him success in the hunt or the
fight .'^ Surely his experience would soon
teach him that the actual course of events

THE PRIMITIVE LIFE 83

proceeded quite uninfluenced by his at-
tempts to secure divine interposition in
his favor. But we must not forget that it
is precisely this actual course of events of
which primitive man is most densely ig-
norant. As the game suddenly and mys-
teriously disappeared from its accustomed
haunts, just so suddenly and mysteriously
it might return. What more natural, then,
than to ascribe its return to the interfer-
ence of a friendly deity .^^ The persistence
and value of religion at this stage is not
due, to be sure^ to any intervention in the
processes of nature made on man's behalf
by his gods. Never, we know very well,
was a single human desire fulfilled through
a control of the natural conditions exercised
by these imaginary beings. But faith in
their existence and power enabled primitive
man to keep faith in himself, in the power
of his personal will, and in this lay the
value of his religion. It gave him the
strength and courage to keep on trying in
the face of disappointment, failure, disas-

84 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

ter. Religion is here (as always) the will's
affirmation of confidence in itself, in the
power of personality and its ability ulti-
mately to achieve that reality for which
it yearns.

Despite the essentially unsatisfactory and
ineffective character of the primitive life
and the moral necessity for transcending
it, this way of living is, nevertheless, the
genuine starting-point of man's progress
and, as such, is rooted permanently in our
human nature. The more highly organ-
ized and comprehensive types of life which
have replaced it are maintained only by
continuous exertion of the will, and period-
ically we grow tired of exercising this
power — of the strain of holding the atten-
tion fixed upon a remote and imaginary
goal, of the effort of adjustment and con-
trivance required to fit the vivid, urgent
present, with its demand for instant grati-
fication, into the scheme or pattern pre-
scribed by the visionary ideal. In such
periods of moral fatigue we tend to relax

THE PRIMITIVE LIFE 85

into the primitive mode of life, to abandon
ourselves to the governance of passing
impulse. Nay, more than this, the legiti-
mate holidays that we all must take are
necessarily of this character; for a time
we allow ourselves to be absorbed in grati-
fying momentary desire, with the pre-
caution that such pleasures as we may
thus enjoy do not interfere seriously with
the larger enterprises to which we have
committed ourselves. Thus we relax in a
holiday at the seashore (to choose a
casual instance), losing ourselves in the
sensations of the moment and heeding no
influence but the call of passing desire,
now walking on the sand, now taking
a plunge in the surf, now resting on a hill
in view of the sea, now sailing toward the
distant island. On such days it is not
difficult to relapse into the animism of
our primitive ancestors: we seem to feel
the spirit of the sea, now sunny and caress-
ing, now brooding and sullen, now violent
and implacable; we could worship the

86 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

sun in his serene and lofty course as the
source of heat and light and growth; the
voice of the wind becomes almost articulate
with messages from far-away shores; the
white sails of the distant ship seem ani-
mated even as the outstretched wings of
the soaring gull. ^

CHAPTER III

THE NATURAL LIFE

In the course of time man discovers
another way of obtaining the object of
his desire, more eflfective (if not easier)
than invoking the power of its protecting
divinity. This is to observe and to avail
himself of the regular sequences of nature,
thus utilizing natural processes and em-
ploying natural forces. From the begin-
ning men seem to have had a vague notion
of the existence of impersonal forces which
controlled the objects of their world in
a manner quite different from the personal
influence exerted by divine spirits: the
arts of magic believed in and practised by
primitive people are proof of this. But
such physical influence was so much less
familiar than the control of nature by
spirit which the earliest human experience
appeared to illustrate, and promised assis-

87

88 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

tance so much less certain and immediate,
that its possibilities were almost entirely
overlooked in the hope of securing instant
relief through divine interposition. But
man could not remain for long blind to
the regular succession of events in nature.
He must soon notice that the green fruit
preceded the ripe, and that both followed
upon bud and blossom; he would observe
that the growth and decay of vegetation
followed the order of the seasons; he would
also see that the same seasonal rhythm
governed the movements of animals, their
mating and reproduction, their migration
and change of covering; nor could the
effect of such physical influences as heat
and cold upon the skins he wore, the food
he ate, the water he drank entirely escape
him.

To take practical advantage of these
regular sequences of natural process seems
to us a simple step; but to primitive man,
groping his way in a strange world, the
step was not easy nor to be taken quickly.

THE NATUEAL LIFE 89

The hoarding instinct which man shares
to some extent with the lower animals
would encourage him to dry and store
grains and herbs for the coming winter
or to await the migratory movements of
the animals in summer and autumn in
order to secure meat sufficient for the
months when they are absent, as the
northern Indians hunt and kill the seal
and caribou. Indeed, such provision for
food and clothing and shelter during the
cold and lean months of winter is the con-
dition of human existence in the upper
temperate and subarctic regions. It is
still a long step, to be sure, from such en-
forced following upon the regular sequences
of nature to the intelligent employment
of natural processes to secure a purposed
result, such as we find in systematic agri-
culture and animal husbandry. How this
further step was taken need not concern
us, although we may indulge our fancy
by imagining how it may have been. A
handful of grain scattered by accident

90 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

upon some soft and broken ground near
the encampment in winter or spring would
result in the growth of the familiar plant
the succeeding summer; such growth with
the ripening fruit would be connected in
observant and retentive minds with the
scattered seed; an enterprising individual
would be prompted to experiment the
next season by planting some grain he
had carefully saved for the purpose. Or
an animal, perhaps wounded, would be
captured alive in the hunt; some whim of
its captors or, maybe, real sympathy for
its suflfering and terror would lead them to
relieve its pain, feed and fondle it; in the
course of its gradual recovery it would be
tamed and made submissive to the weight
of man or child upon its back or to the
tension and pull of the harness attaching
it to cart or sledge. In some such way,
we fancy, the first beginnings were made
in tilling the soil and in the care and use
of animals.

When man, in effort to provide for com-

THE NATURAL LIFE 91

ing needs, seeks ends which lie in the future
and not in the present, he rises to a higher
plane of achievement; he lays the founda-
tion for a more comprehensive life. This
larger life has also its source in volition. It
is, in fact, just a further expression of will:
the will to have a life not confined to the
present moment but extending over and
uniting a succession of moments, the will
to have a world not of single objects merely
but of regularly ordered events and uni-
formly acting forces. Arising as the crea-
tion of his own will as it encounters objec-
tive conditions, this new world costs man
both effort and suffering; for future com-
fort is secured only by present toil, future
suffering is prevented only by present pri-
vation, and thus to resist present desire
and to forego the certain pleasure of its
gratification requires an effort greater than
any made hitherto. The larger life calls
for a greater faith, the larger world in-
volves more hazardous adventure. It is
necessary to remind ourselves somewhat

92 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

forcibly of this fact, since through train-
ing and social experience, foresight and
prudence have become so habitual with
us that we are apt to forget that pro-
vision for the future springs originally
from faith, not knowledge, that confidence
in the uniform operation of natural forces
is primarily an act of will rather than the
counsel of reason. Faith must be exer-
cised because that future welfare to which
man must sacrifice the desire of the pres-
ent exists, at the time when the sacrifice
has to be made, only as an idea in his imag-
ination. To this idea, to his ideal of a
future life, man must attribute a reality
superior to that possessed by the present
in which he actually exists. Such reality
he can give to his ideal future only through
an act of will, and in such act of will, as-
serting the reality of the unperceived and
unactual, consists faith. Of course, thought,
interpreting past experience, may approve
of such faith. Certainly faith, to be ef-
fective, must be based upon knowledge.

THE NATURAL LIFE 93

must go as far as possible under its gui-
dance, and must never run counter to it.
But knowledge can never justify such con-
fidence in an imagined future, can never
prove that this possesses a reality equal or
superior to that possessed by the actual
present. In the final reckoning, the future
of any human individual must remain, as
far as his knowledge is concerned, un-
certain. Our knowledge enables us to fore-
cast the future with remarkable accuracy,
but does not guarantee it; all the science
of civilized man does not enable him to
predict with assurance what his future will
be ten years ahead, one year ahead, one
month, one week, one day ahead. The
universe is so vast, its possibilities are so
many and varied, that the element of con-
tingency cannot be expelled from human
life: always uncertainty will remain, al-
ways the unexpected will happen. There-
fore, to sacrifice a present which, for all its
limitations, actually exists — vividly, insis-
tently, exists — and promises certain satis-

94 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

faction, for the sake of a future which the
fullest knowledge must leave uncertain is
in the fullest sense of the word, to venture;
it calls for genuine courage. But, some one
may interpose, even the animals, without
the intelligence which enables man to fore-
see and plan, provide to some extent for
their own future; they build shelters and
store food for the coming winter. Surely
such provision for future needs is not to
be reckoned a great achievement on man's
part! Yes, but the operation of instinct
in the case of such animals converts pro-
vision for future need into a present im-
pulse whose indulgence furnishes immediate
pleasure. And man's intelligence, while it
unrolls the curtain of the future a little
way for him, also reveals to him what the
animal never knows — ^the vicissitudes and
uncertainties of earthly existence, the im-
minence of disaster and death, the tran-
siency of mortal life. No, man's reason
seems at times to justify him in snatching
at the delights of the flying present, for-

THE NATURAL LIFE 95

getting if he can the perils of the future.
Certainly intelligence does not give to
man the fuller life to which he aspires,
nature does not present him with the
larger world for which he yearns. These
must come through labor of spirit, through
the "slow, dead heave of the will": man
must walk by faith; he must have the
courage to grapple with his own future.

The expansion of the boundaries of
human personality to include the future
along with the present and past, we thus
see to be the work of volition. It rests
upon a postulate of rational will, the sec-
ond which is implied in man's personal
development, the postulate that events occur
in fixed sequences which when followed out
enable man to provide for his own future
comfort and safety. This is belief in the
uniformity of natural processes as seen
in their bearing upon human action. A
recognition of the fixed order in which
events actually occur makes it possible
for the human individual to utiHze objects

96 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

existing in the present as means which
may be depended upon to produce pur-
posed results in the future. Thus man is
led to transfer the power to produce re-
sults which he feels in himself to these
existing objects and they become for him
causes. The postulate which we are con-
sidering is, of course, no other than the
principle of causality. The uniformity of
operation which this principle posits has
a double application, to outer, or physical,
and to inner, or psychical, events. Applied
to the physical world, it means the dis-
covery and acknowledgment of the more
obvious and, in a sense, fundamental se-
quences of nature: those pertaining to
the seasons and the weather, of the sun as
causing light and warmth, of sultry heat
as followed by cloud and thunder, of cloud
as bringing rain; the sequences of plant and
animal life, such as germination, growth,
fruition, and decay; the action of the fa-
miliar materials, like wood, stone, skins,
and finally metal, under diverse conditions,

THE NATURAL LIFE 97

such as heat and cold, pressure and strain.
Uniformities are at the same time ob-
served in the behavior of human beings.
The sequences here perceived and utihzed
are really of psychical events, although, to
be sure, psychical and physical processes
have not as yet been clearly distinguished.
Certain impulses are seen invariably to
produce certain movements; the leading
motives of human conduct are singled out
and connected each with its characteristic
expression. Anger is recognized as the
cause of assault and blows, fear the cause
of flight, lust as the cause of intrigue and
abduction; love, moreover, is seen to re-
sult in loyalty and service, avarice in the
accumulation of property and the harden-
ing of the heart, indolence in poverty and
dishonesty. Thus we find a nascent recog-
nition of the two great types of causal re-
lationship: the mechanical in the action
of physical forces, and free agency in hu-
man behavior.

Upon these observed sequences in the

98 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

action of physical objects and of human
beings is based a way of hving which we
may call the natm'al life — natural, because
it is engaged in utilizing familiar forces
of nature to preserve man's natural exis-
tence and secure his physical comfort. This
has been the dominant mode of living among
men since the dawn of human history; it
is still the typical human Ufe, Uved by the
great majority in Asia, by the peasantry
of Europe, and the most of the rural pop-
ulation of America. In fact, until the
modern industrial system took its rise, this
mode of life was lived by all mankind ex-
cept tribes of savages on the one hand
and that comparatively small fraction on
the other which, through favoring circum-
stances or superior intellectual endowment,
had escaped its limitations and at the
same time lost its substantial benefits.
It is the life which follows the rhythm of
the seasons, expanding into vigorous out-
door activity when the warm spring sun
thaws the frost from the ground and dis-

THE NATURAL LIFE 99

solves with its genial rays the icy shackles
which have bound brook and stream and
contracting within doors to the sedentary
occupations of the fireside when the frost re-
turns in the late autumn and the wind blows
bitter-cold over the snow-covered fields.
It is the life which is rooted in the soil,
the life of sowing and of reaping, of spring
festival and of harvest home. Almost
the whole of its sustenance is drawn from
the soil which furnishes necessary food,
and fuel for cooking and winter heat, and
materials for building and tools. It is
the life which depends upon the possession
and employment of domestic animals:
horses, cattle, sheep, goats, and poultry
are systematically bred and cared for in
order that they may serve purposes of
transportation and draft, or may furnish
food and clothing. The stable is an ad-
junct to the house, the poultry populate
the dooryard; the offal from the stable
feeds the land, the soil in its turn produces
food for man and beast. The social Ufe

100 FAITH JUSTIFIED^ BY PROGRESS

which has this agricultural setting consists
for the most part of the association of mem-
bers of the family and the rural neighbor-
hood in the common work of satisfying
their fundamental physical needs. Co-
operating in the toil of house or of field,
participating in the hearty pleasures of
the family meal, the mutual enjoyment
of the warm hearth and comfortable bed,
if to these common activities we add those
which spring from the sexual and social
instincts, such as courting and marrying,
the begetting and rearing of children, with
talking and jesting, the singing of songs
and the playing of simple games, we have
taken account of the main features of
man's natural social life.

If we consider now the activities by
which man seeks to attain future comfort
and security, we find that they differ in
important respects from those by which
he seeks to gratify his present desire. In
action from momentary desire which is
the earliest and simplest expression of

THE NATURAL LIFfe' ,•;^ •; ^i?ji :'(;•,

will In man, the human individual en-
deavors through movements of his own
body to gain possession of the desired
object. Such movements are of necessity
pecuhar to the individual; they follow from
his position relative to the object, from
his own physique and skill; they cannot
be generalized or reduced to rule. But the
activities by which man endeavors to pro-
vide for his future welfare are based upon
observed sequences of events. They can
become matters of common knowledge;
hence the activities based upon them can
become the common practice of a people,
or of mankind. The practice of agricul-
ture which gives character to the type of
human life we are discussing well illus-
trates this. Depending upon sequences
of natural events carefully noted, the rota-
tion of the seasons, the variation in the
moisture of the soil, the stages in growth,
and so on, the successive steps in this
activity are identical from year to year,
and the same with all individuals. The

/:^a|]^*<iFAI3P^ JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

practice of agriculture may thus be re-
membered and taught by one generation
to the next; it becomes an art, and as
such the possession of a tribe or people.
Not being grounded in an experimental
analysis of the actual conditions, such
practices are not applicable by mankind
universally; based rather upon empirical
generalizations made in particular regions,
methods of agriculture may be depended
upon to produce the results aimed at only
in regions where conditions of soil and
climate are the same or very similar. But
such activities, if they cannot be uni-
versalized, can at least be generalized, and
therein lies their superiority to earlier ac-
tivities which are individual accomplish-
ments merely.

Faith in uniformities of natural events
and of human behavior, a faith which re-
peated trial raises nearer and nearer to
assurance, serves therefore as the founda-
tion for the technic of industry and of
government. In addition to agriculture

THE NATURAL LIFE 108

other arts are developed. The sequences
occurring in the growth, nourishment, and
reproduction of animals constitute, when
perceived, the basis of the art of animal
husbandry. The cooking of food, the
dressing of skins, the making of weapons,
the weaving of cloth, the building of houses
become likewise arts, each with its estab-
lished technic. Transportation with hu-
man or animal carriers and navigation of
a crude kind are in their turn methodized.
In the sphere of government and politics
confidence in the uniform operation of
certain leading motives among human be-
ings makes possible an established pro-
cedure which is, of course, the essence of
political organization. It is assumed that
every man will, on the one hand, protect
and cherish the members of his own imme-
diate family, defend and seek to increase
his own material possessions, augment if
he can his influence and reputation among
his fellows; while, on the other, he will,
by every means in his power, attempt to

104 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

avoid suflFering and death, the loss of
property, social opprobrium, and disgrace.
The strength of these motives serves to
perpetuate and make effective the system
of customs by which primitive society is
organized; later they are relied upon to
secure the enforcement of law. Here, also,
experience converts faith into practical
assurance, but there are sufficient excep-
tions to make the result uncertain enough
when the attempt is made to control the
behavior of the individual human being.
Outside the authorized activities of govern-
ment, in all the diverse associations of
men in trade and industry, in the family
circle, and in friendly companionship, this
same faith is exercised, faith in the ef-
ficacy of specific motives, when once in-
duced, to produce definite and predictable
modes of behavior; it is the very corner-
stone of intelligent social life. Yet how
often does it fail! The son whom the
father expected to arouse to instant and
continued industry by an account of the

THE NATURAX LIFE 105

family need, or the description of a remark-
able business opportunity, surprises his
parent by showing no interest or energy
whatsoever; he has his own purposes, un-
known to every one, even his own family.
In dealing with human beings who are
free agents, action is doubly a venture.

When volition strives to extend its power
over the future as well as the present, the
ends which it seeks are, of course, more
comprehensive. True, the quality which
man believes the object of his momentary
desire to possess and on account of which
he seeks this object is, as we have seen, a
universal: this same quality belongs to
all members of a class of objects; it exists
as a matter of common knowledge and,
it may be, of common desire among dif-
ferent individuals. But when the pur-
poses of the human will are enlarged to
include the future, the ends aimed at are
not simply universals, they are groups of
universals, systems of qualities. Consider
wealth, for example, when it is pursued as

106 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

a provision for future security and comfort.
Its attainment means the possession of a
multitude of objects, each of which has its
characteristic attributes: abundant food,
handsome clothing, ample holdings of land,
horses and cattle, with many other in-
cidental objects, each offering its distinctive
satisfaction. The other "natural" goods
of man, such as fame, health, and pleasure,
are likewise systems of objects, each promis-
ing its distinctive satisfaction. These more
inclusive ends which aim to cover and
provide for the whole of man's natural
existence are, in the second place, not
merely common to different human in-
dividuals as are the qualities of single
objects; they are, to be sure, thus common,
but they are more than this. They are
communal, that is, they provide for the
satisfaction or well-being of more than
one individual. The others whose well-
being the individual seeks to secure along
with his own are primarily those of his
own family and immediate circle of friends;

THE NATURAL LIFE 107

yet in last analysis there is implied in the
pursuit of these ends (often unknown to,
and in spite of, the agent himself) a regard
for the welfare of the community. They
are, in fact, community ends. The man
who seeks wealth almost never seeks it
for himself alone; he wishes to support
his family, to provide enjoyment for his
friends. But suppose that he does seek
it for his private pleasure merely, still
its continued and peaceable possession by
him would depend upon the maintenance
of law and order in the community; hence
his will to amass wealth for himself is also
the will to support at least a rudimentary
sort of order and justice among his fellows.
The same is true of fame; if it is merely
the craving for self -glory it must will some
degree of discriminating intelligence and
independent judgment to other men or
else their praise and adulation would seem
empty and worthless. Of course, it is
possible to press this point too far. Wealth
and fame and pleasure are not universal

108 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

ideals like truth and beauty, whose at-
tainment by any individual confers a boon
upon all humanity; their pursuit is often
radically and ruthlessly selfish. The fact
which deserves attention is simply this,
that when man's purposes are enlarged to
include the whole period of his natural
existence, the identity of human interests
is such that his ends become normally
communal ends and that no such purpose
is entirely without this reference to the
welfare of the community in which he
lives.

The natural life is pre-eminently a life
of action. If feeling dominates primitive
human life, it is action which gives char-
acter to the next stage in human develop-
ment. Man endeavors to provide for his
future well-being by unremitting industry
in utilizing actually existent forces of nature
as means, which will, he expects, through
their uniform operation, produce this re-
sult. He toils in the field, in the house, in
the workshop; he, sows and he reaps, he

THE NATURAL LIFE 109

subjugates and employs animals, he jour-
neys far for materials and builds himself
houses, he dresses skins and weaves cloth,
he constructs tools and weapons. His life
is spent in a constant struggle to control
the forces of nature; he must be vigilant
as well as industrious, watchful and wary
to seize every advantage and turn it to
his own profit. This battle with, and con-
quest of, the forces of nature has left its
indelible mark upon human character: the
natural man is a man of action; he despises
any other mode of life as trifling and un-
manly. His view of the world alters to
suit the change in his conduct: as his
own activity gains in scope and efficacy, his
world grows in continuity and coherence.
Existing objects he no longer conceives in
terms of the movements which he and his
fellows must make to approach and avoid
them, as a multitude of things located in
space and thus externally related to one
another. The actual world he rather con-
ceives as the theatre wh^re different forces

110 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

operate, forces which man may rely upon
to produce certain results. Both physical
objects and human beings are regarded as
causal agencies whose behavior may be
predicted and hence depended upon. Even
in the sphere of values action is upper-
most. Objects are sought for the sake of
the actions which they make possible.
Men seek to gain control of more land in
order that they may raise more crops or
pasture more cattle; they build houses in
order to provide places suitable for cook-
ing and eating, for the fashioning of clothes
and the care of children, for friendly con-
verse and merrymaking; they train horses
in order that they may ride or may trans-
port commodities. A very important dif-
ference exists, it is true, between that ac-
tion which is sought as an end and that
which is employed as a means. The action
by which an object is sought is necessarily
determined in course and character by the
nature of that object or other related ob-
jects; it consists in the adjustment, the

THE NATURAL LIFE 111

adaptation, of actually existing forces and
things to the attainment of the purposed
end; it is essentially arduous and exacting
— ^is work. Into the action which we seek
as an end, on the contrary, the principle of
freedom, the element of play, enters: we
seek so to enlarge the field of possibilities
as to be able to act thus (or otherwise)
according to our choice. A man toils and
saves to buy more land not in order that
he shall be compelled to put it to a certain
use, but in order that he may use it for
agriculture or for grazing, for this crop
or for that, as he pleases. Men work to
build houses not solely for the sake of
gaining a place where they may continue
an arduous and compulsory routine, but,
partly at least, in order to have a place so
sheltered, so warm, so secure, that they
may eat, sleep, be sociable, or carry on
some other indoor occupation, as they see
fit. The action which appeals to human
beings as worth while for its own sake, and
is therefore sought as an end, is 5^Z/-deter-

112 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

mined, but this feature does not bulk very-
large in the natural life of man.

To overcome man's inability to secure
the necessities of natural existence by
means of a more extensive effort whose
outcome is postponed to some future time
but which sets going just those forces that,
in the course of their regular operation,
may be expected to supply the need of
such future time — this is the attempt of
human volition. By this effort man's
outlook has been enlarged to envisage the
future as well as the present; his life has
been expanded to take in a system of in-
teracting forces, a community of fellow-
men behaving with characteristic freedom.
Thus volition asserts its power over the
whole of man's natural life; it strives to
provide for his security and comfort dur-
ing the whole period of his natural exis-
tence. To this end it finds several objects
instrumental, and the attainment of these
objects it takes for leading purposes. Such
purposes are the accumulation of property.

THE NATURAL LIFE 113

the care and preservation of health, the
formation of reliable social ties in family
and community. To the realization of
these purposes it proposes to make every
act instrumental. Has the effort of man's
will to insure him of a lifetime of secure
and comfortable existence been success-
ful .^^ Has man's faith in the uniformity
of natural processes, his confidence in the
trustworthiness of human motives, been
justified or not? How has his venture
turned out.'^ To these questions perhaps
a sufficient answer is given by the fact
that the leading world-religions, Chris-
tianity and Buddhism, numbering among
their adherents more than half of man-
kind, assume as the axiomatic basis of
their gospels that man's effort to gain for
himself security and happiness in his earthly
existence is a failure, that natural goods
are not worth pursuing. Why.^^ Because
the forces of physical nature prove finally
to be beyond man's control and the forces
of human nature to be unaccountable and

114 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

treacherous. Nature flouts man's faith in
her forces, his fellow-men betray the con-
fidence he has placed in them. Always
come disaster and disease, cruelty and
neglect, old age and death. The worm
lies at the core of all man's natural
goods, the death's-head is present at every
feast.

Again the spectre of evil appears and
blocks the path of volition in its courageous
advance to annex the unknown country
of the future. To the efforts of man's
will to organize his world, thus including
everything that exists within the unity
of his personal life, evil opposes itself as
the fact of ineradicable maladjustment,
of irreconcilable conflict. This stubborn
opposition manifests itself in both natural
and social spheres. The forces of nature
prove to be — as far as man can observe
and understand them — ^incalculable and
uncertain; they refuse to be controlled,
to be adjusted to the needs of human
existence. To the faithfully cultivated

THE NATURAL LIFE 115

crops drouth comes, to the carefully tended
herds pestilence; the result is famine and
suffering. Houses and barns intelligently
planned and laboriously constructed are
demolished in a day by fire or flood. Whole
regions, cleared and brought to a state
of high fertility by the work of generations,
with smiling fields, happy homes, and
prosperous inhabitants, are destroyed by
volcanic eruption, or laid waste by devastat-
ing storm. Disease strikes old and young,
and its sudden attacks cannot be foreseen
or eflFectually resisted. The man who, by
industry and thrift, has accumulated suf-
ficient property to insure himself of a
comfortable livelihood and to provide for
his growing children is himself prematurely
stricken with the paralysis of old age, or
left desolate by the sudden death of son
or daughter.

In the social sphere, increased organiza-
tion only brings into clearer relief the es-
sential antagonism of men's natural in-
terests. In order to provide for his own

116 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

future needs and insure his growing family
of the means of subsistence and comfort,
a man must concentrate his mind entirely
upon his own affairs, devote himself un-
remittingly to his own task, and, in equal
measure, neglect the concerns of his fel-
lows. With the development of habits of
industry and thrift comes inevitably some
degree of insensibility to the needs and
sufferings of others, of disregard for their
welfare. The careless generosity of prim-
itive life, the open-handed hospitality of
the savage, gives place to the hard and
close-fisted prudence of the industrious
artisan or peasant. Thrift and prudence
grow easily into avarice, and avarice makes
men hard-hearted and cruel, willing to
injure and oppress their fellows, even to
enslave and torture them, if through their
instrumentality the individual may in-
crease his own fortunes. Then the pos-
session and enjoyment of riches by the
industrious, the able, the fortunate ex-
cite the envy and hatred of those who.

THE NATURAL LIFE 117

through indolence or misfortune, are suf-
fering from lack of the necessities of life.
These malcontents are incited thereby to
deeds of violence against their more pros-
perous fellows — to robbery and arson and
murder. Nor is it easy to see how these
evil results which attend upon social evolu-
tion could be prevented; for the material
goods which the world supplies are limited
in amount, and their accumulation to any
marked degree in the hands of the few
means that the many must go without.

Social organization not merely brings to
light latent antagonisms between individ-
uals within the group; it also appears to
encourage rivalry and even enmity between
groups. As the result of systematized
communal industry, orderly social life,
and stable government, there is developed
in the minds of the individuals thus as-
sociated a consciousness of tribal or na-
tional unity. They come to take pride in
the power and possessions of their tribe
or nation; they become jealous of its

118 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

prestige and ready to resent any real or
fancied transgression of its rights by other
peoples. Social organization makes pos-
sible also concerted action in defense of
group interest. A little experience in
fighting is suflBcient to show the advantages
of capable leadership and strict discipline
in warfare. Hence the art of war is also
systematized: leaders are chosen and
obeyed, armies are drilled and equipped.
When, in addition to glorying in the mili-
tary exploits of its armies, a people is at-
tracted by the idea of adding to its own
possessions through the easy method of
plundering those of neighboring peoples,
it is well on the way to a career of military
conquest. Then follow all the horrors of
war that we know only too well, ills wreaked
by men upon their brother men: bloody
wounds and death agony, brutal lust and
savage cruelty, helpless misery and smok-
ing ruins. Following the train of con-
tinued warfare come other social ills, less
acute but more lasting, such as captive

THE NATURAL LIFE 119

slavery, the abduction and subjection of
women, and military despotism.

In this emergency, also, it is rehgious
faith which gives man the courage to con-
tinue, the hardihood to endure. His prim-
itive religion develops to meet the needs
of his enlarged life. His gods are no longer
nature spirits, able, when he invokes their
power, so to control the object or process
over which they preside as to furnish him
with the satisfaction which he desires.
They have acquired permanent character,
distinct individuality, because to them
are attributed characteristic purposes, in-
dividual aims, which they strive contin-
uously to realize. From this continuity
of divine purpose comes a uniformity of
divine action, which may be depended
upon in the future as well as remembered
of the past. As the result of assigning per-
manence of purpose to the gods and thus
imparting more definiteness and power to
their personality, they are gradually loosed
from their close connection with particular

120 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

objects and processes in nature. In con-
sequence of this separation they grow
fewer in number and continue to preside
only over the different departments of
nature, such as the sea or the earth or the
heavens, and the major activities of human
hfe, such as love or learning or warfare.
The important thing to notice just at this
point is that the gods are believed to have
abiding interests of their own and to be
constant in their devotion to these interests.
What these divine purposes are conceived
to be may and does vary greatly: in some
mythologies they are represented as self-
aggrandizing ambitions or corrupt intrigues,
in others they are in a certain sense benev-
olent, as when the tribal or national deity
is supposed to glory in the military con-
quests of his people. But at any rate the
gods have estabHshed purposes: in these
purposes they are permanently interested,
of them they are exceedingly jealous. And
just as two men having two very definite
and very different ambitions may see the

THE NATURAL LIFE 121

advantage of co-operation, and may make '
a compact whereby each serves the in-
terest of the other, so man and God may
covenant with one another, each agreeing
in a specified way to serve the other's in-
terests. Thus if man will but keep the law
of God handed down in the sacred writing,
or constantly follow the prescribed ritual
of worship once divinely revealed and
miraculously preserved through the ages,
God will shield him from calamity, protect
him from disease, insure the safety of his
possessions, preserve the hfe of his children.
And the gods will keep their promises.
No matter how unsatisfactory or even dis-
creditable from an ethical standpoint the
special ambitions of individual deities in
this type of religious faith may be, the gods
have at least this virtue which lies at the
foundation of all intelligently organized
society — they will be true to a compact,
they are bound by an agreement. To
power is therefore added justice — ^justice
in the sense of giving what is due, paying

122 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

what is owed — which becomes the leading
attribute of deity in this second stage of
human progress.

Rehgion thus plays a necessary and im-
portant part in the natural life of man.
Shrines mark the turnings of the road,
temples crown the hilltops, churches dot
the countryside. In his religion man here
but reaffirms his belief that there is an in-
telligible uniformity in the operation of
natural forces, reaffirms it in the face of
hazardous uncertainties, unexpected ex-
ceptions, calamitous interruptions. Only,
the uniform action of natural agencies he
now refers back to the continuity of divine
purpose operative in the world. Some-
times the purposes of the gods are con-
ceived as identical with the leading human
purposes, as when we have gods of war, and
of wisdom, and of agriculture; then a hu-
man individual may honor a deity when he
pursues his own legitimate life aims, and
has a right to expect divine protection in
the prosecution of his enterprises. But usu-

THE NATURAL LIFE 123

ally the gods are supposed to be interested
chiefly in their own glory; then it is a fair
exchange of services between God and
man: man by prayer and sacrifice glorifies
God and God so controls the forces of
nature as to avert calamity from him and
insure the fulfilment of his ambition.
Religion thus expresses man's faith in the
power of purpose to control the actual
course of events — the power of purpose
which he is conscious of having himself
exerted, but being in his case challenged
by an intractable and incalculable world.
The moral value of such faith is easy to
appreciate. It gives man courage to under-
take the pursuit of aims whose fulfilment
can come only after years of toil and wait-
ing, in the far future, near the end of life,
perhaps; for his purpose, which seems puny
and insignificant when pitted against the
resistless onrush of physical events, is
strengthened and reinforced through its
alliance with a more powerful purpose
able to control even the mighty forces of

124 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

nature. It gives him also courage to en-
dure setback and failure, even to rise un-
daunted after overwhelming calamity, be-
cause he believes God is on his side and
will see him successfully through at last.
Nor is it difficult to see how such faith in
the controlling influence of divine purpose
over nature could persist — at least for
some time. For the very courage to endure
with unshaken resolution calamity and
failure, and the initiative to begin afresh
with undiminished vigor and undimmed
hope are themselves most effective influences
in bringing ultimate success. And when the
purposes of the pious man are completely
and finally set at naught by unfavorable
circumstances it is always possible to sup-
pose that his piety was really spurious and
that the disastrous outcome of his life but
exposed his previous hypocrisy.

After a time it becomes impossible longer
to believe that piety, when added to fore-
sight and industry, will certainly bring
prosperity and avert accident in the nat-

THE NATURAL LIFE 125

ural life of man; it is seen that the rain
from heaven falls alike on the just and
the unjust. The reward of the man who
has labored faithfully in the fear of God
is then believed to be postponed to the
after-life; the fulfilment of his purposes are
supposed to occur in another world. In
this after-life the individuals who have
been idle and malicious, false to their vows,
and neglectful of divine worship, receive
also their just recompense of frustration,
failure, and suffering. Thus in the world-
to-come a final adjudication of human
affairs is made and all earthly debts are
paid; for God is not merely Lawgiver, he
is Judge of all the world. Thus to re-
sort to belief in another world distinct
from the natural and to rely upon this
world for the fulfilment of purposes under-
taken here, for the final rewards of the
earthly existence, may seem to be a con-
fession of failure and bankruptcy on the
part of the natural life of man. So in a
sense it is; yet the after- world as a place

126 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

of final rewards and punishments acquires
no reality distinct from, and independent
of, the natural world. It is rather a shadowy
counterpart of the natural world with some
shifting of scene and changing of character,
and it exists as a kind of postscript or ap-
pendage to it. Belief in the value of natural
goods is not abandoned, nor is faith in
the natural methods of obtaining them
destroyed; only the powers of imagination
are enlisted to provide a longer time for
the working of the methods and the enjoy-
ment of the results. Thus a sort of com-
promise is struck: when the diligent, god-
fearing man succeeds in amassing riches
and enjoying their possession his success
is attributed to his own efforts and the
divine favor; but when the endeavors of
such a man are unsuccessful and he suffers
from his failure, his pain and disappoint-
ment are looked upon as temporary trials
for which he will be more than recompensed
by an added amount of happiness in the
world to come. While the introduction

THE NATURAL LIFE 127

of the after-world with its rewards and
penalties, as a factor which must be reck-
oned with by the individual who plans and
works to insure his future existence and
well-being, does not mean the elevation
of man to a diflferent and higher plane of
living, still it does foreshadow the final
breaking-up and abandonment of the ideals
and practices of the natural life, since it
indicates a growing dissatisfaction on the
part of man with the limited outlook which
the course of natural existence offers to
his will, an increasing impatience with the
uncertainties of its prospects, the transiency
of its joys.

Notwithstanding its limitations, the nat-
ural life is a necessary stage in human
progress, and hence its aims and activities
retain an important place in human life.
Man must establish himself as a natural
being in the natural world before he can
project the loftier ideals of a universal
spiritual life; nay, he must, as we shall
see, return to nature for a closer grapple

128 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

and more thorough conquest of its forces
before he actually realizes these universal
spiritual ideals. The natural life makes
therefore a permanent appeal to the normal
human being. It has about it a peculiar
substantiality which causes men to look
back upon it with longing, to return to
it with relief, after protracted and soul-
taxing effort spent in the pursuit of spir-
itual ideals, which by contrast, seem often
to be insubstantial, elusive, unreal. It
is the life rooted in the soil, and from
the soil it draws vigor and hardihood.
It follows the rotation of the seasons and
participates in the periodic revival, growth,
and fruition, which accompany seasonal
change. It battles often victoriously with
the crude elemental forces of nature and
acquires therefrom masterfulness and viril-
ity. We are none of us insensible to the
appeal of the natural life with its call to
hard labor and its promise of solid enjoy-
ments; back to the soil men must at inter-
vals go, it would seem, for renewing of

THE NATUBAL LIFE 129

strength and steadying of nerve. If the
spring-morn or the summer-day awakens
the wanderlust within us, tempting us to
fare forth into woods and field, following
momentary impulse and doing what for
the present pleases us, a mellow October
day with its message of rich fruition brings
home to us the tangible rewards of the
natural life: we would have a share in
the farmer's work and the farmer's plea-
sures, participating in the vigorous, hopeful,
preparations of the spring, in the hard
but effective toil of the summer, in the
joyful activities of harvest and harvest
home, in the satisfaction of facing the
coming winter with well-filled barns, abun-
dant fuel, and comfortably furnished house.

CHAPTER IV

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE

As his pursuit of present pleasure brings
man disappointment and disaster, so his
endeavor to insure himself of comfort and
well-being during the course of his natural
lifetime turns out to be a failure. A con-
viction of the essential uncertainty of the
natural life and the consequent transiency
of its joys is either produced in him slowly
as the outcome of observation and ex-
perience of the vicissitudes of fortune in his
own case and that of others, or else bursts
upon him with overwhelming force as the
result of some devastating personal calam-
ity. But the breakdown of the ideals and
practices of the natural life does not leave
human volition crushed by defeat or pros-
trate through failure: it responds to the
emergency with characteristic faith and
vigor by projecting the plan of a larger

X30

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 131

and more permanent life. On the ashes of
its burnt-out hopes of natural security
and satisfaction it raises the ideal of a
life which shall be beyond the reach of
misfortune and decay, a life of eternal
and abiding reality. For, incidental to
his pursuit of natural goods, man had
learned of the existence of ends whose
attainment depended upon the favor of
no external agency whatsoever, but exclu-
sively upon the activity of his own will.
His capacity for thought was his own, he
could exercise it in acquiring knowledge in
bad fortune as well as good: his power of
choice remained with him while he had
life and sanity; his emotions could be
trained to find pleasure not in pursuing
or appropriating material objects but in
contemplating the beautiful and harmo-
nious in nature and in man. Devotion to
such spiritual ends now promised to give
widest scope to human personality, greatest
substantiality to human life. In order that
it might give itself unreservedly to their

132 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

pursuit volition attempted to shake itself
free from all entanglements of body, all
limitations of natural existence; it pro-
posed to rise to a supernatural life.

The supernatural life is therefore char-
acterized primarily by its devotion to "spir-
itual" ends. But the term '* spiritual,"
when thus used, stands in pressing need
of definition and explanation. For no word
in common speech is more vague and in-
definite than this. Standing in the thought
of most persons for something that is
misty and elusive, its significance has been
cloudy and confused. "Spiritual," as ordi-
narily used, suggests the invisible and
intangible, the morally elevated and edi-
fying, the divine and ecclesiastical — a mix-
ture of ingredients, with a mystic flavor.
Now this vagueness and incoherence spring
from the fact that the meaning given to
the word is principally negative: the spir-
itual is understood as that which is dif-
ferent from, and opposed to, the natural or
material. Hence it remains as essentially

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 133

the imperceptible and non-sensuous, the
invisible and intangible. Given no posi-
tive qualities of its awn, our thought tends
almost inevitably to conceive it as the
shadowy counterpart of the material, less
definite in outline, less substantial in struc-
ture. The spiritual world is thus imagined
as the abode of insubstantial apparitions;
the spiritual life becomes the pursuit of sub-
lime but ghostly abstractions. Moreover,
anthropologists have found in primitive
human thought the belief in such a shadowy
duplicate of the material world, peopled
by ghostly doubles of actual human beings,
and this belief they suppose to have orig-
inated in the attempt of primitive man to
explain the episodes and personages of his
dreams. Thus the idea of a spiritual realm
seems to many to be discredited as a relic
of savage superstition. The conception of
a spiritual life and a spiritual world lose
their last touch of reality; they dissolve
away completely into a cloud of myth and
fancy.

134 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

The truth is that the spiritual world
possesses as much positive reality as the
material. The idea that it is a dream
world, an imaginary realm, is false and
preposterous. The fact that spiritual goods
become constant and enduring objects of
pursuit by the human will may seem suf-
ficient proof of the reality of the spiritual —
and so, indeed, it is. But in order that
the real nature of the spiritual world shall
be understood, its positive qualities must
be discovered and its relation to the ma-
terial world clearly perceived. Now we
have already noted the need from the
standpoint of voluntary action, of rep-
resenting objects in terms of the bodily
movements required to attain them. This
need our intelligence meets by constructing
the world of matter and of motion. As a
further development of this same point of
view, we have found it advantageous to
think of objects in terms of the movements
of other objects supposed to produce them,
and in result the world is conceived as a

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 135

complex of interacting forces. The neigh-
boring spring I thus represent as in a fixed
location — ^at the foot of yonder hill — and
conceive it as the result of the down-
rush of subterranean water. But it is
equally necessary if our wills are to find
expression, to conceive of objects in an-
other way, and that is in terms of the
satisfactions they promise and the further
ends to which they lead. In consequence
of this primary personal necessity the
spiritual world arises, and it is equally
original, equally authoritative with the
material. The spring which from the ma-
terial standpoint is situated in a definite
place and is the effect of certain causes is,
from the spiritual standpoint, the means
of slaking human thirst, of restoring man's
strength and renewing his vigor for further
activities. Who can deny that the thirst-
quenching quality is an objective fact,
just as real as any object of the material
world .f^ The relation of the objects con-
stituting the two worlds is altogether dif-

136 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

ferent. In the material world objects are
related to men's physical organisms, which
are diverse and exclusive, hence their re-
lation is external and mechanical. In the
spiritual world they are related to the
rational will, which is one in all human
beings; hence their relation is essential
and organic. Since many difiFerent material
objects may possess the same quality of
satisfying the human will, such a quality
is recognized as a universal and, as such,
is part of the spiritual world. Many dif-
ferent springs and wells have the quality
of slaking human thirst: this quality is
therefore a universal; it has no place in
the physical world but belongs to the spir-
itual realm. But while a multitude of
physical objects have the one same valuable
quality, it is also true that a single physical
object may possess many valuable qualities
— ^its meaning may include many uni-
versal. Thus the single deer-skin may
serve as clothing, as a tent-covering, or
as a case for tools and weapons. The con-

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 137

trast between the two worlds, that of
matter and of spirit, comes home to us
with full force when we consider that an
object which, from the standpoint of the
material world, is one of the most in-
significant, feeble, and temporary features
in the landscape, like a shepherd's cot on
the mountainside, may easily be the most
real and significant object there from the
spiritual point of view, because it has the
most comprehensive purpose and makes
possible the widest range of intelligent
activity.

The modern city may serve as an illus-
tration of the diflference between the two
worlds, for it can be understood from the
standpoint of matter or of spirit. Viewed
physically, it is an aggregate of buildings
and of living individuals, the buildings of
wood and stone and steel, spread over a
vast expanse, massed together and pressed
upward toward the centre, and the living
individuals hurrying to and fro, out and
in, among them; it has a river flowing

138 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGBESS

through it and Knes of railway converging
upon it; in the more congested centres are
stores and banks and offices, farther out
are dweUing-houses, churches, and schools,
still farther, perhaps, are factories and
parks and cemeteries. Spiritually, the city
is a "kingdom of ends": first, although
lowest in the scale of spiritual reality, are
the industrial and economic purposes which
it subserves, the food and clothing and
shelter which its activities of production
and distribution provide for its inhabitants;
these are but means to the more inclusive
ends of the family life, of education, of po-
litical organization; this second class of ob-
jects is in its turn instrumental to the
still fuller personal life which libraries and
churches, museums and universities make
possible. The same city, but how differ-
ently are its constituent factors related in
the two worlds ! In the one, a museum and
a business house may crowd one another in
the same block, a factory may stand be-
side a park, but in the other the museum

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 139

and store, park and factory, belong to dif-
ferent grades of reality.

The existence of the spiritual world is, to
be sure, not a late discovery of human in-
telligence, but its explicit recognition and
continued study had to wait for the time
when man should turn away in disappoint-
ment from the pursuit of natural goods.
In giving names to the common qualities
which he found numbers of physical objects
possessing, primitive man acknowledged the
existence of another order than the physi-
cal. For these names stood for permanent
satisfactions which classes of objects could
be expected to furnish the human will.
These universals determine conduct; they
become ends of action with the individual,
and he seeks by talking of them and their
attractive features to influence the action
of others. The generalized purposes which
are pursued in the succeeding stage of
human development are not merely satis-
factory qualities, they are groups or sys-
tems of satisfactions. Wealth is sought

140 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

because it opens the way to many further
activities at the choice of the agent (only,
as we have seen, these activities are usually
of a physical character). Here, again, the
communication of general purposes makes
possible mutual influence and co-operation
among men. But these purposes, involving
series of activities, systems of objects, have
to be discussed and explained if they are to
be understood by all members of the com-
munity. It is as the outcome of such dis-
cussion and explanation that the concep-
tion of a spiritual world takes its rise. The
idea then dawns that men may by thought
and discussion classify objects in terms of
the satisfactions which they themselves af-
ford and the further ends to which they
lead. The discovery is made of another
world than the natural, an ideal or spiritual
realm, a world of values, dependent for ex-
istence not upon physical force but on
rational reflection and appreciation. This
world is justly deemed a spiritual world,
because, as has been said, its interrelations

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 141

and unity flow directly from the one ra-
tional will which actuates all men. Its de-
termining principle is not mechanical neces-
sity but spiritual freedom. Its compelling
attraction, moreover, its power to arouse
enthusiasm and awaken aspiration, testifies
directly to the demand of the one will surg-
ing through us all, a demand for a larger
and fuller life.

Because of the importance of the spir-
itual principle to human progress, further
consideration must be given to the consti-
tution of the spiritual world and the devel-
opment of the ideal of the spiritual life.

Beginning the discussion afresh, there-
fore, let us first note that the object which
we locate as a particular thing in the phys-
ical world becomes, when we consider it
from the standpoint of the purpose it sub-
serves, a universal. As a universal, it is
identical with no particular thing existing
in a definite time and place; it is identical
with the quahty or character common to a
number of particulars and uniting them

142 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

into a class. Thus, house, from the physi-
cal standpoint, is a particular thing; each
house has its special time and place of ex-
istence. The house I live in has its particu-
lar situation: I must walk in a certain
direction if I would approach it, mount
several steps and turn a knob if I would
enter. But house, in the light of the pur-
pose which gives it its meaning, that of
affording shelter to human individuals and
families, is a universal, because this quality
of furnishing shelter belongs equally to all
the habitations of men. From the spiritual
standpoint, then, the real object turns out
to be not the particular member of a class
but the essential character which all mem-
bers of the class possess in view of the pur-
pose they all subserve. Indeed, from this
point of view, these universal meanings are
the primary realities; a particular thing
derives what reahty it possesses from par-
ticipating in the essential quality character-
istic of its kind or class. My house is a
reality, not on account of the accidents of

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 143

its size, location, and material, primarily,
but rather because of its essential meaning,
a meaning which belongs to all houses be-
cause they realize the same end of provid-
ing shelter. It was Plato who first saw
with clearness the reality of these universal
characters, founded upon the common pur-
poses which things subserve; he asserted
that such ideal entities were the only things
truly real; he called them ideas y and since
his time they have been known as Platonic
ideas.

Now, the distinguishing mark of these
ideal essences or characteristics is their
universality, and their universality at first
appears in the fact that they are general
and not particular. The degree of their
universality will consequently be seen to
depend upon how general they are, how
many objects they are common to. It is
obvious, moreover, that characters diflFer
widely in generality and hence in the
universality which depends upon it. More
general than house in meaning is human

144 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

production, for it includes tools and weap-
ons and clothing as well as shelters — every-
thing in fact that man can make and
fashion. As essential characters differ in
degree of generality they may be arranged in
a series leading from the least to the most
general, as, for example, Socrates, Athe-
nian, Greek, Aryan, Man, Living Being,
Being. Since these universal qualities rep-
resent purposes which groups of objects
fulfil for the one rational will which acts
in all men, they are not by nature inde-
pendent of one another nor separate in
their fields of existence. Differing them-
selves in degree of generahty, these char-
acters are subsumed, the one under the
other, as the less under the more general,
as species under genus. Thus, "house"
in meaning falls within "building," which
includes also barns, workshops, etc.; "build-
ing" falls under the head of "human pro-
ductions," which embrace, in addition,
tools, clothing, and the like. Proceeding
with such classification, all qualities or

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 145

characteristics may be subsumed under
the one least definite and most common,
as the summum genus, and thus united
in one system. Thus plants, animals, and
men fall under the concept of living being,
and this, along with that of inanimate or
non-hving being, under the concept of
being. Being, the most general of char-
acteristics, signifies that quahty which an
object must have to become an end of
vohtion at all — the power of reacting to
the human will, and hence conditioning its
expression. Thus our thought, exploring
the meaning of things, discovers a system of
characters, all universal and all purposive;
this system is of course none other than
the Platonic hierarchy of Ideas.

Let us, then, acknowledge this truth:
these ideal characters are fully as much
facts as are the objects or events of the
physical world; their relations are every
whit as essential and binding as the se-
quences of physical events; together they
constitute a system just as real as the inter-

146 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

acting forces of the material world. The
reality of this ideal or spiritual system is
implicitly acknowledged in every act of
volition. But its conscious recognition adds
much to the scope and significance of human
life, besides reminding man of the dignity
of his own freedom. For man to understand
that the object which he realizes is in its
essential character universal enlarges his
conscious horizons; he recognizes that his
experience is not private, particular, ex-
clusive; he sees instead that in attaining
his own end he is participating in universal
human achievement. Understanding fur-
ther that the end which he seeks has a
permanent place in an abiding system of
meanings, he is able in its attainment to
rise free from the changing flux of physical
events and identify himself with universal
and eternal reality. Reflection brings
home to him the universality of all human
intelligence, the fundamental unity of all
human voHtion, and on this foundation
he may build his own personal character

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 147

undisturbed by the change and decay of
the physical world. Moreover, this first
insight into the structure of the spiritual
world increases man's knowledge of the
possibilities of attainment which exist for
his will. The system of meanings just de-
scribed is in truth a world of freedom, for
its constituent factors have their char-
acter and position determined not by any
external agency but by their relation to
the human will itself. As first formulated
by Plato the hierarchy of ideas was ret-
rospective rather than prospective in its
reference, it is true — conceiving of objects
not so much in terms of the further pur-
poses which they might subserve as in
terms of the qualities which they, at least
by implication, already possessed and were
able to offer. Thus my house is not con-
ceived in terms of the many further pur-
poses which it may fulfil but in accordance
with the qualities already inherent in its
essential character as a house — that it is
a building, a physical object, etc. But if.

148 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

understanding this, we appreciate all that*
is impHed in the meaning of things, we
shall enormously enlarge our possibilities
of satisfaction, shall greatly enrich the
resources of our world.

We acknowledge the existence of uni-
versal characters, due to the fact that the
groups or classes of objects furnish to the
will the same satisfaction. House is such
a general character, since the purpose of
giving shelter is common to all houses.
But in addition to the features that are
common to all cases, these general char-
acters have a further meaning which dif-
fers in different instances of their appear-
ance. This is due to the fact that the
further ends or activities to which these
ideal characters lead are different in dif-
ferent cases. All houses share in the com-
mon purpose of furnishing shelter, but
some are means to many further ends;
all furnish the one fundamental satisfac-
tion, but some make possible many more
extended activities: all houses give shelter;

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 149

some are, in addition, centres of family
life and domestic devotion; a few of these
latter are also sources of far-reaching so-
cial benefit. Now, the point to be no-
ticed just here is that the meaning of the
ideal characters we are discussing includes,
in the case of each one, all the further ends
to which it may lead. Hence its universal-
ity consists not merely in its generality,
in the number of instances of its same
identical quality which it sums up, but
also in the variety of different features
which it includes. Its full meaning, its
total character is therefore seldom, if ever,
exemplified by every one of its instances;
indeed, it would seem that the more fully
the meaning of a character is developed,
the fewer are the instances of it which we
should hkely find. Searching, therefore, for
the true meaning of universal spiritual ob-
jects, we are forced to choose between
instances, seeking for those in which the
possibilities of the character in question
have been most fully explored. We should

150 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

not expect to find the full meaning of
house in the quahties common to all houses
from the Indian wigwam to the royal
palace; we should seek for it in those
cases where houses were made to furnish
the greatest variety of human satisfac-
tions.

To recognize that objects whose general
character is well known are capable of
yielding different degrees of satisfaction,
according as one has the intelligence to
grasp their possibilities and the enterprise
to follow them up, is still further to enlarge
the opportunities for voluntary achieve-
ment. The scope of activity which the real
world permits to human volition is seen to
depend not entirely upon the number of
objects it attains — this, as we have seen, is
determined largely by fortune and circum-
stance— but partly, at least, upon the use
which it is able to make of the objects it
does possess. A man with the wit to un-
derstand the uses to which a house may be
put, and the ability to avail himself of the

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 151

means which it places at his disposal, may
obtain a more extensive satisfaction from a
cottage than many another does from a
mansion. This fact was reHed upon by the
Cynics and Stoics, ethical schools of an-
tiquity, to support their cardinal doctrine
that man finds happiness and spiritual free-
dom only when he ceases to depend upon
material possessions and seeks those spir-
itual ends whose attainment depends only
upon his own reason and will. The wise
man, they held, can turn any event or
circumstance into a means of personal
development by understanding its universal
character and availing himself of its pos-
sibilities for spiritual expansion. Even the
direst calamity, his reason will show him to
be the necessary outcome of universal law,
and capable when properly met of strength-
ening his courage and increasing his power
of endurance. If a storm lay waste his
fields and destroy his crops, his reason will
understand it as a result of those regular
processes of atmospheric change which are

152 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

responsible for the invigorating breeze and
beneficent rain; thus he may accept the
event calmly, even gratefully, regarding the
necessity for repair and rehabilitation which
it creates as an opportunity for the exercise
of his courage and enterprise. Reason not
merely discovers the permanent possibili-
ties of satisfaction already existing in the
world, it also reveals the opportunities for
further achievement offered by every event
that occurs.

We have not exhausted the meaning of
the spiritual world, however, when we see
that its ideal constituents, besides being re-
peated in many different instances, may
themselves be means to many diflferent
ends. In this way we do enlarge our con-
ception of their universality, understand-
ing it not merely as generality but as com-
prehensiveness. But this new insight has
important consequences which, when made
clear, will bring us in sight of our goal —
and show us the spiritual world as a grow-
ing reality. These ideal objects differ in

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 153

the degree of their comprehensiveness, in
the range of further activities to which
they are instrumental. Varying as they
do, certain ones which are less comprehen-
sive are included within the meaning of
others which are more so, not generically,
as the particular falls within the more
general, but organically, as the part is in-
cluded within the whole of which it is a
member, and to whose existence it is in-
strumental. Thus gymnasium, in its ideal
character or meaning, not merely falls as a
particular under the more general concept
of building, it is also included as a factor in
the more comprehensive character or signif-
icance of college or university to whose life
it is instrumental. Relating these spiritual
objects in the order of their comprehensive-
ness, we shall see them in the fulness of
their reality as an expanding system. Thus
individual security, family life, the posses-
sion of property, the establishment of repu-
tation, are all of them involved in tribal or
conmiunity well-being; the well-being of the

154 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

community thus maintained, of many com-
munities, in fact, is included within the
more comprehensive meaning of national
welfare, reahzed through care for public
health and education, the administration of
just and eflFective government, convenient
facilities for communication and transpor-
tation, efficient methods of producing wealth
and fair methods of distributing it; na-
tional welfare, and international as well, are
themselves included within the still more
comprehensive end of universal human well-
being depending upon mutual understand-
ing, mutual co-operation, and mutual sym-
pathy among all men, ends which are just
beginning to be realized, and thus converted
into spiritual realities. This spiritual sys-
tem represents the progressive expansion of
the sphere of free human activity, hence the
progressive realization of the human will; it
is a system whose character and constitu-
tion are determined by no other agency
than rational volition itself.

Appreciating how the objects of the spir-

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 155

itual world are related in an order of in-
creasing comprehensiveness, we are led in-
evitably to the thought of an all-compre-
hensive object, an object which includes in
its meaning all possible quaUties, an object
which, in its attainment, subserves every
purpose and realizes every end. Now this
conception, while it is merely an ideal and
does not really constitute the spiritual
world a completed whole, has nevertheless
an important regulative oflBce in pointing
out the direction of its development and in-
dicating the goal of its progress. The con-
ception of an object so comprehensive as to
include in its meaning all possible satisfac-
tions is simply an expression of the demand
of volition itself for an all-comprehensive
life; it is this demand projected in the form
of an ideal, an end to be realized; once
attained, it would insure to the will a life of
uninterrupted activity, of perfect satisfac-
tion. The life promised through the real-
ization of the Absolute Ideal presents it-
self in diflFerent forms: as thought, which

156 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

through the classification and correlation of
all ideas, attains Truth; as feeling, which
through an appreciation of the harmonies
among perceived objects, attains Beauty; as
conduct, which through a proportionate
reahzation of all human capacities, attains
Goodness. Since, further, the Absolute
Ideal is conceived as furnishing complete
satisfaction to rational volition as such, it
must provide through its activities for the
satisfaction of volition in all its individual
embodiments. This means that it must
provide for the satisfaction of all human
individuals in so far as the power of rational
volition has gained expression through them.
Hence the Absolute Ideal may be conceived
as a perfected society of free persons, an in-
telligent community united in complete mu-
tual understanding, co-operation, and sym-
pathy. Such a life, indeed, does volition
aspire to; it stands, therefore, as the su-
preme ideal of human conduct.

While the conception of an all-com-
prehensive object has an important bear-

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 157

ing upon the structure of the spiritual
world, we must not forget that it is, never-
theless, an idea and not a reality. For
there is a distinction between a spiritual
ideal and spiritual reality. This distinc-
tion is one easy to overlook because spir-
itual objects are all of them ideal in the
sense that they are universal and are re-
lated not mechanically but teleologically.
Impressed with what we may thus con-
sider to be the ideality of the spiritual
world as a whole, we are naturally inclined
to slur over any distinction between idea
and fact within its boundaries. Yet this
distinction holds, and cuts very deep.
Real spiritual objects are objects which
have been realized through voluntary ac-
tion, whose possibilities of satisfaction have
been proved through the experience of
actual attainment. Of this character are
many established social goods, such as
family Ufe, popular education, democratic
government, etc. These ends have been
in large part realized and their meaning

158 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

for volition actually verified; one may
seek them with reasonable certainty of ob-
taining their promised satisfaction. Even
the more comprehensive ends of truth and
beauty have been so far attained as to
make their value a fact for human intel-
ligence: science and art each opens the way
to a wide range of free activities. But
the ideal of a perfected society of free
beings, of the completed development of
human personality, of universal human
brotherhood, has not thus been realized —
at least not suflSciently to warrant us in
considering it a reality. It is an ideal,
the supreme, the governing, ideal of hu-
man conduct, but as yet idea and not
reality.

A serious error it is, therefore, to regard
the Absolute Good as a real object in the
spiritual world. Yet just this error was
committed by those wise and earnest souls
of antiquity who first clearly recognized
the existence and structure of the spiritual
world and sought to identify themselves

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 159

with its reality. The idea of an object
comprehensive enough to satisfy every
inteUigent purpose they took to be the
ultimate reality. Or, otherwise expressed,
reality they believed to be a teleological
system, every part of which was the ex-
pression and fulfilment of intelligent will.
So thought the Stoics who, of all the an-
cient schools of moral philosophy, attained
to the clearest and most adequate concep-
tion of the spiritual world and the spir-
itual life. They believed that the existing
universe or "nature" was really a perfect
spiritual system, every part of which was
determined by rational purpose. For man
himself to realize the universal spiritual ideal
no effort on his part was required to trans-
form the actual conditions of his life — every
event that actually occurred in the world
was already a necessary means to the
fulfilment of the Universal Purpose. He
had only to understand the circumstances
of his own life, whatever they might be,
in their true reality and he would find

160 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

them to be expressions of the One Ra-
tional Will pervading the universe and
manifested in his own personality, would
see them, in fact, as the realization of his
own freedom. In the sphere of action,
consequently, the Stoic doctrine required
of the human individual not effort but
acquiescence. This meant, however, that
the whole burden of moral attainment was
thrown upon human thought: it was man's
reason which was relied upon to raise him
to eternal spiritual reality. And it was no
light task which was thus assigned to
human intellect — to understand how every
object that existed, every event that oc-
curred, no matter to what extent it frus-
trated man's plans and thwarted his pur-
poses, no matter how much sufifering it
caused him, was, nevertheless, a means to
the fulfilment of the Universal Purpose
which was his purpose. Of course, it is
impossible thus to conceive of all human
experiences if we take them at their face
value, as they actually present themselves.

THE SUPERNATURAX LIFE 161

Hence the logic of their position compels
those who, like the Stoics, believe that all
reality is comprehended within one spir-
itual system to regard much of what occurs
in the world of human experience as not
real but apparent — to regard evil in its
different forms as illusory. Hence there
results an increasing tendency to disregard
and depreciate the world of sense-experi-
ence and observed fact with its contradic-
tions and maladjustments, in favor of an
ideal sphere where everything is imagined
to work in harmony with the realization
of one supreme end. The spiritual world
tends to become more and more an object
of mystic vision, a Heavenly City, far re-
moved in its perfection from the earthly
scene. As such, the spiritual world be-
comes more and more completely divorced
from the natural. The latter, from being
merely apparent, becomes positively evil,
its evil inhering, however, in its negativity.
In this way, with the Stoics and Plato-
nists, spiritual objects became supernatural

162 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

objects and the life devoted to their pur-
suit a supernatural life.

In the course of human history a new
type of life thus arises which may ap-
propriately be called supernatural. Super-
natural, because those who professed it
explicitly abandoned all natural "goods,"
wealth, fame, and bodily comfort, and
devoted themselves entirely to the attain-
ment of spiritual reality. Natural exis-
tence was esteemed only as furnishing the
occasion and opportunity for rising to a
supernatural life. In this higher life man
identifies his will with ends which possess
not future existence only, but eternal
reahty. Human volition seeks not merely
to encompass the whole course of man's
natural existence; it aspires to embrace
the spiritual ideal in its unity and com-
pleteness. Once more, then, does the will
of man seek a remedy for the disappoint-
ment and failure resulting from over-
confidence, in the exercise of still greater
faith; it prepares the way for a final vie-

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 163

tory over the ills of nature by transcend-
ing the sphere of natural existence alto-
gether and converting it into a means for
the reaUzation of a more permanent and
complete life.

Even if one fail to see why faith is needed
to enable one to pursue the object of his
momentary desire or to provide for his
future security and comfort, no one will
deny that faith is exercised by the man
who sacrifices all natural goods in order to
seek a spiritual ideal. If on the contrary,
we do admit that it takes real initiative
to enable a man to resist the attraction of
surrounding objects, while he seeks to ob-
tain an object which at the time is only
an idea, and that it requires true courage
to forego the assurance of present pleasure
in order to pursue an end which lies in the
uncertain future, how much more must we
acknowledge that genuine heroism is dis-
played by one who renounces the whole
natural world with its pressing actuality and
prospect of substantial benefits for ends be-

164 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

longing to the world which his own spiritual
vision has created! In the first stage of
human progress man sacrifices the object of
present perception to the end which his
thought represents, in the second stage he
sacrifices all the satisfactions which the
present situation offers in order to pursue
an end which his imagination projects into
the future. But this future, while imaginary
and uncertain, is nevertheless represented
as continuous with the present, part of the
same order, to be enacted in the same space,
and joined to the present by the chain of
natural causation. The third step which
we are now considering, compels man to
turn his back on the familiar world in which
he has made himself at home, the world
founded on the primary necessities of action
and the use of his own physical organism.
This world, whose actuality has become
estabhshed and imperious, is to be re-
nounced for another world, which is not as
yet fully constituted and whose completion
depends in part on the eflForts of his own

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 165

will. The structure of the spiritual world
is not forced upon his notice by conditions
of his own acting; it is discovered by him
after he has reflected upon the possibilities
of satisfaction held forth by different ob-
jects. Nor can he depend upon his own
experience of attainment to teach him of
the value of objects; that will be far too
limited. He must be able to discuss this
subject with his fellows, considering the
different purposes which objects subserve,
and their varying degrees of comprehensive-
ness. Out of such discussion and the fur-
ther reflection to which it leads, the realm
of ends, the world of freedom, takes its rise.
It is thus the creation of general intelligence:
its objects, although they may be real, re-
quire for their discovery the exercise of
conceptual thought. And when we con-
sider that the human will at this stage is
not content with devoting itself to those
ideals which in some cases have been
achieved and have had their value realized,
but commits itself to the reahzation of that

166 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

end which is not merely spiritual, but a
spiritual ideal, that of the Absolute Good,
the AU-eomprehensive End, which when at-
tained will yield every possible satisfaction,
we see that it has required of itself a su-
preme courage, a sublime faith.

The faith upon which the supernatural
life rests may be expressed in the form of a
postulate. Human thought in this case
postulates the existence of a complete system
of ends in whose permanent reality man can^
through the exercise of his reason, participate.
The principle in question is, of course, that
of teleology, since the relation which binds
objects together in this spiritual system is
that of means to end. The teleological
principle is one that emphasizes the essen-
tial unity of humanity; for the ends with
which it is concerned are, as universals,
common to all individuals and witness the
underlying unity of will among them. Be-
cause, moreover, these ends are included in
a single comprehensive system, the indi-
viduals who reahze them are joined in a

THE SUPERNATUBAL LIFE 167

community of purpose. This spiritual sys-
tem does not need the efforts of man to
realize it, however; it already exists as a
finished reahty. Man has only to exercise
his reason in order to understand this — ^to
see things as they are, all comprehended
within the system of universal spiritual real-
ity. And since this spiritual system is the
completed fulfilment of the Universal Will
which manifests itself in each human indi-
vidual, intellectual insight into the spiritual
organization of the universe imparts per-
manent reality to the man who attains it,
for it shows him all the possibilities of his
own will completely reahzed.

The activity through which man ex-
pected to attain to supernatural reality
was intellectual — the activity of conceptual
thought. The supernatural life was re-
garded as an achievement of the reason
common to all, exercised in free discussion,
but rising to the full height of its powers in
philosophical meditation. It is conceptual
thought that distinguishes man from the

168 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

animals and enables him to discover uni-
versal characters whose permanent reality-
underlies the changing particulars of sense.
It is conceptual thought which reveals to
the human individual all the possibilities of
satisfaction in a given situation and, at the
same time, by showing to him his true nature
as a man, enables him to take the course
which promises most to enlarge the life of
humanity. It is conceptual thought which
discloses to man's vision the Absolute Spir-
itual Reality and enables him to welcome
every event that occurs in his life as an ex-
pression of the Universal Purpose and,
hence, the fuljSlment of his own will. To
make thought thus play the part of action
in the attainment of an end may seem like
a contradiction in terms, since we have
understood by action adjustment to actual
conditions, and thought deals only with the
ideal. Still, actuality appears as the limit-
ing or conditioning factor even in thought
— if not as presented, at least as repre-
sented. Actuality appears in thought in

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 169

the form of ideas that have been verified
and hence stand as facts. These ideas thus
acquire the independence of actuahty, the
standing of estabUshed facts. To them our
theories must adjust themselves, with them
our speculative constructions must deal;
and they may show a stubbornness and in-
adaptability which is equal to that of actual
existence. Thus, as noted above, the con-
structive thought which endeavors to com-
prehend all reality within one teleological
system finds an almost insuperable obstacle
in the facts of sin and evil.

The end at which this intellectual activ-
ity aims is a life which attains supernatural
reality because identified in thought and
disposition with the universal spiritual sys-
tem. Ideally, this means membership in a
community of intelhgence which is eternal,
because founded upon teleological relation-
ships which persist in spite of the transiency
of particular things that manifest and
exemplify them. While natural objects
change and decay, the purposes they sub-

170 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

serve are permanent and enduring, because
they are all comprehended within the one
absolute purpose, which is the supreme
reality. The supernatural life means, then,
in the hopes of those who seek to achieve it,
citizenship in a Heavenly City which abides
in the face of all earthly dissolution and de-
cay, a city which includes all humanity, or
at least all men who rise to the possibilities
of their rational selfhood. In actual prac-
tice the supernatural life has meant a life
withdrawn from active pursuits, commer-
cial and political, and devoted to rational
reflection. Thus the ancient Stoics found
the highest human good in the "life ac-
cording to reason." Through reason alone,
they believed, could man be freed from the
evils and limitations of the natural life,
since rational insight depended upon no
gift of fortune and was always within the
power of man as man. They, therefore,
proposed to uproot from their natures those
desires which required for their gratifica-
tion the possession of material objects in
order to pursue, undisturbed by earthly

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 171

events and emotional clamor, that intellec-
tual activity which revealed to them the
eternal realities. The supernatural life be-
came in practice the life of the wise man
secluded from the world and absorbed in
his own thought. The Neo-Platonists, who
followed the Stoics, went even further
in their " other- worldliness," discarding
thought as a source of insight into the na-
ture of reality, because even its most gen-
eral principles retained an element of defi-
niteness and limitation, while Absolute
Reality they held to be beyond limit or
definition. Hence this later school placed
above reason feeling^ a state of emotional
ecstasy which, they thought, must super-
vene, after reason had accomplished its
uttermost, in order to reveal to man the
Infinite Spiritual Reality. In the final step,
the supernatural life is carried beyond the
sphere of rational discussion, of intelligent
communication, and made in its essence a
mystical, an intuitional, an ineffable experi-
ence.

The intellectualism and other-worldliness

172 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

of the Stoic doctrine, however, did not
prevent its resulting in notable practical
achievement. For the Stoic "life accord-
ing to reason" was understood as a "life
according to nature," that is, a life accord-
ing to the rational purpose controlling the
world. But harmony with the Universal
Purpose meant for the individual discharge
of his vocation in the world; also it meant
recognition of the equal rights of all human
beings as alike expressions of the cosmic
reason. Hence we find the Stoics labor-
ing effectively for such poUtical and social
reforms as the extension of the rights of
Roman citizenship to foreign peoples and
the amelioration of the condition of slaves
and serfs. In fact, the ancient Roman
society presents no figure so noble, so sub-
lime, as the Stoic, strengthened and poised
by his spiritual vision, maintaining his phil-
osophic calm, undisturbed by the allure-
ments of vice, unaffrighted by the threats
of tyrants, unshaken by suffering, torture,
and death — a living demonstration of the

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 173

essential dignity of man as a rational be-
ing.

But this bold attempt of human volition
once and for all to transcend the limitations
of natural existence and to shake itself free
from entanglement with changing, decaying
matter did not succeed. Despising all nat-
ural goods, these brave souls proposed to
make physical existence merely the occa-
sion for entering upon a supernatural life.
The fulfilment of this high purpose de-
pended, nevertheless, upon the possession
and use of physical existence. Hence,
man's will while seeking a supernatural
good could not free itself from dependence
upon nature and natural existence. Man
must at least exist as a natural being before
he can attain supernatural reality. Al-
though he proposes to use his physical ex-
istence merely as the occasion for gaining a
foothold in the supernatural sphere, still it
is indispensable as a foothold; without it he
cannot so much as enter the spiritual king-
dom. Moreover, the vast majority of men
need more than bare existence, mere life, in

174 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

order even to seek spiritual goods. Bodily
health, with some degree of comfort and
leisure, must first exist before the powers
of conceptual thought and constructive
imagination required for the comprehension
of spiritual principles, can be effectively ex-
ercised. There are exceptional cases, to be
sure, of men possessed of great constitu-
tional vigor, power of endurance, and
strength of will, who are able to retain in-
tellectual poise and continue philosophic
meditation in spite of suffering due to dis-
ease or persecution or compulsory toil.
But such cases are exceptional; most men
require a measure of physical well-being
before they can begin spiritual attainment.
Hence the supernatural life fails in its at-
tempt to escape altogether from natural
evils. Indeed, it exposes itself in a special
degree to the blighting eflFect of physical
ills, for its very unwilhngness to take
care to provide for future health and com-
fort, its deliberate neglect of the conditions
of physical well-being, which follow logi-

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 175

cally from its contempt for all natural
goods, expose it in an exceptional way to
interference and interruption from natural
ills. The ills of the flesh, the pains of cold
and hunger and disease, remind philoso-
pher and saint that they are but men after
all, and compel them to descend from the
lofty heights of rational reflection and spir-
itual ecstasy to grovel in the mire of physi-
cal necessity. Nor does the seeker after
supernatural goods free himself from the
hostile influence of that other species of evil
which has its source in the conflict of inter-
ests among human individuals. Despising
as he does the physical enjoyments which
other men seek, and endeavoring to elim-
inate from his character all those natural
desires, including those instincts, sexual,
parental, and social, which bind into fel-
lowship the members of family and com-
munity, he is carried by his intellectual
preoccupation more and more out of sym-
pathy and understanding with the com-
mon run of men. The only other human

176 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

beings whom he deems worthy of his seri-
ous attention are those who are capable
of entering into his thoughts and discuss-
ing the problems which absorb him. Hence
a special form of selfishness is produced
by supernaturalism, by other-worldliness —
a spiritual pride, an exclusiveness and self-
sufficiency which makes its exponents ob-
livious to the sufferings as well as to the
worldly ambitions of their fellows and, in
its final development, makes them willing
to gain the comfort and ease favorable to
spiritual culture, through the toil and pri-
vation of their fellows.

Certainly we should not be surprised to
find that the faith which sustains the lofty
aspirations of the supernatural life wavers
in the face of such difficulties. Compelled
by unavoidable physical ills to admit the
stubborn, nay, the pressing reality of the
natural world, it is not to be wondered at
that men began to doubt of the reality of
any other sphere. In a moment of spir-
itual vision men get a glimpse of a more

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 177

comprehensive and enduring reality and,
filled with noble enthusiasm, they resolve to
abandon all natural goods and find perma-
nent home for their souls in the supernat-
ural realm. But, in later years, after the
exigencies of physical existence have forced
them into constant entanglement with mat-
ter, the light fades from the objects of spir-
itual vision. The supernatural sphere be-
comes, in contrast to the material world,
unreal and insubstantial; it seems only a
fancy, made of the stuiSF dreams are made
of — ^and faith in it fails. In such spiritual
crises, when will seems in danger, through
the failure of its ideals, of losing confidence
in itself, we have found it drawing from
religion new strength and courage. Thus it
ever has been in human progress, and thus
it was in the case of the supernatural life;
we see those schools of ancient thought
which had condemned all natural goods as
transient and uncertain, and sought in the
spiritual world for an abiding reality, turn
in the closing centuries of the ancient era

178 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

to religion, in the hope of strengthening
their faiUng faith. They looked to religion
for some divine revelation which should
demonstrate the reahty of the spiritual
world. They felt the need of a revelation
which should come with authority, not the
kind of authority possessed by the conclu-
sions of human reason, but an authority wit-
nessed in the physical world by signs and
wonders, by divine interpositions and mi-
raculous happenings. Consequently, men
of high purpose and philosophic train-
ing in the Grseco-Roman world interested
themselves in various Oriental religions,
desiring to receive from the miracles and
wonders which their exponents related or
were reputed to perform some convincing
evidence of the existence and power of the
supernatural. Most promising of all these
religions was that of the Hebrews. For the
Jewish scriptures professed to reveal not
only the character of the supreme spiritual
being, but also to record its successive ap-
pearances to men. The superiority of such

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 179

historic revelation to any philosophical
argument in convincing men of the exis-
tence of the supernatural, and in arousing
them to the pursuit of spiritual goods, could
not be gainsaid. An attempt was actually
made to combine Greek philosophy with
Hebrew theology; a curious system of be-
liefs was formulated in which the Hebrew
God with the archangels and angels who
do his will, was identified with the Platonic
hierarchy of ideas.

It was the Christian religion, however,
whose advent at a critical time suppUed the
doctrine of the supernatural life with that
reinforcement necessary to convert it into
one of the great civilizing influences in the
world's history. To the ancient world
which was seeking in vain some support for
its waning faith in spiritual values, Chris-
tianity came with its message of an author-
itative revelation of supernatural reahty.
The authority of this revelation was at-
tested, its exponents maintained, by the
supernatural origin of Jesus, by the mira-

180 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

cles he performed, by his resurrection from
the dead. It was further witnessed by the
miracles and theophanies of the Hebrew
dispensation, culminating as this was said
to do, in Jesus, the promised Messiah. In
content Christianity was a revelation of
the nature and will of God. In the person
and teaching of Christ, God was revealed as
a Spirit possessed of infinite reality and
absolute moral perfection. The lofty ethi-
cal monotheism which developed out of the
Hebrew religion after it had been purified
in the fire of national calamity and refined
by ages of religious meditation, received in
the life and death of Jesus an expression
sufficiently dramatic and appealing to win
in the course of a few centuries the atten-
tion of the civilized world. This fresh reve-
lation of supernatural reality was eagerly
seized upon by ancient society, sick as it
was of the natural world and its transient
joys, and yearning for an abiding spiritual
home. It was of necessity interpreted by
Greek and Roman thinkers in terms of their

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 181

own thought, i, e,, the conceptions of Greek
philosophy. God was characteristically con-
ceived in the Hebrew religion as sharply
separated by his personality and moral will
from the natural world. This the divine
transcendence, taught as a matter of course
by the Christian gospel, was interpreted in
terms of the Platonic and Neo-Platonic
philosophy. God's moral perfection was
understood as his freedom from all entan-
glement with matter — ^his pure immaterial-
ity. The need for a mediator was then
apparent if this transcendent deity was to
exert any influence upon the material
world. This was the office assigned to
Jesus: he was identified with the Logos, the
divine reason immanent in the world.

Here, then, was a God whose existence
guaranteed the reality of the spiritual
world. For supernaturalism conceives the
spiritual world not dynamically but stati-
cally, as a complete, an eternal, a perfected
whole. It is, therefore, absolutely divorced
from the natural world, where everything

182 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

changes and nothing is final. Between the
two worlds, lower and higher, is fixed a gulf
of absolute opposition. The one is irre-
trievably material, the other is trium-
phantly spiritual; the one is changing, the
other permanent; the one is fragmentary,
the other complete; the one is discordant,
the other harmonious. In order that su-
pernaturalism should enlist in its service all
the resources of religious faith, the dualism
in question had to find expression in a new
conception of God. This was achieved by
mediaeval Christianity, when it conceived of
God as characterized essentially by his
purity, his freedom from any stain or lim-
itation of matter. To the attributes of
power and justice, which in preceding
stages of religious evolution had been
ascribed to God, was now added holiness.
This quality overshadowed the other two,
expressing as it did God's essential and
perfect spirituality. Converting the ideals
of supernaturalism into the sovereign
reality, this conception of God trans-

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 183

formed at one stroke an idealistic philoso-
phy, comprehensible only to a select few,
into a potent morahzing force.

Christianity offered to all men salvation
from the sins and sorrows of the natural
life and assurance of eternal reality. The
plan of salvation had its source in the pur-
pose of God, for Him completely realized; it
was revealed and executed by Christ, the
divinely appointed mediator. With the
mediaeval theory of salvation, the philos-
ophy of the Incarnation and Atonement
then formulated and standardized, we are
not here concerned. For us it is suflScient
to note that through faith in Christ and
compliance with the requirements of the
Church, the authorized representative of
Christ on earth, the human individual was
supposed to obtain divine grace sufficient to
save him from the destruction that awaits
everything earthly, and to secure his adop-
tion into the spiritual kingdom. Once saved
from the evils of the natural life, the inter-
est of man was withdrawn from earthly

184 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

concerns and centred upon the spiritual
world. He was encouraged to neglect
worldly afifairs and to abandon natural
goods; he was led to look upon this world
as a temporary halting-place in his pilgrim-
age to a heavenly home. Commerce and
industry ceased, therefore, to appeal; social
relationships (except those of ecclesiastical
origin) lost their significance. Material
advancement ceased; social progress was
checked. Religion with its direct outlook
upon the supernatural was regarded as the
proper vocation of man, and the true re-
hgious life was understood to be that of
secluded meditation and prayer.

However unreal the natural world may
appear, however insignificant its happen-
ings when contrasted with the abiding
reality and eternal significance of the super-
natural, nevertheless nature does exist and
the events of human history have occurred.
As actual facts they demand from the ex-
ponent of supernaturalism some explana-
tion in terms of his own faith. This ex-

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 185

planation was furnished in the cosmology
and philosophy of history formulated by
the early Christian fathers and theologians.
In accounting for the existence of the nat-
ural world, mediaeval theology adopted the
cosmogony of the Hebrew scriptures. The
world was created out of nothing by God
in six days; each distinct form of Ufe was
specially created; man was made by God
in His own image, designed thus to be the
lord of all creation. For man, the Divine
Creator made special laws, obedience to
which would insure him of a life of perfect
bUss. But tempted by Satan, a fallen
angel who had led in rebellion against the
authority of the Most High, the first man
Adam disobeyed God's law, fell from divine
grace, and incurred the punishment of sin.
The curse of sin was transmitted from our
first parents to the whole human race. All
men are born depraved; consequently they
suffer the fatigue of constant and often un-
availing toil, the pain of disability and dis-
ease, the fear of certainly impending death.

186 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

Hence the melancholy record of human
history; of man's futile strivings for power
and pleasure, of his unspeakable cruelties
to his fellow-man, of his degradation and
bestiality, of his grovelling terror and inde-
scribable sufferings. But God did not en-
tirely withdraw his favor from man; His
eternal purpose which embraced man's
creation and his fall included, also, a plan
for his salvation. Thus in a world envel-
oped in the darkness of sin a feeble light
was kindled and kept burning, handed
down the hue of Hebrew patriarchs and
prophets until the divinely appointed time
when it should blaze forth and illuminate
the world. This time, the turning-point in
the world's history, was that of the birth of
Christ, who was the Son of God and took
on human flesh in order to save men from
the curse of sin. Through His life and
teachings, Christ revealed the will of God
to man; through His death. He made
the necessary atonement for human sin.
Thenceforth the way was opened for man

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 187

to escape from all the ills of natural exis-
tence and obtain eternal life. The body of
Christ's followers, organized as the Chris-
tian Church, continued as His representa-
tive on earth. Thus the Church became
the visible embodiment of the supernat-
ural reality ; her authority was supreme
over all temporal powers, all earthly king-
doms; she held the keys of heaven, for
through her sacraments only came that
divine grace necessary for human regenera-
tion and sanctification. In the life of the
Church, in fact, as the communion of those
saved and sustained by divine grace, man
enters that supernatural life which is not
terminated but rather fulfilled by physical
death. The mediaeval philosophy of his-
tory, thus barely outlined, gives to the
faith and ideals of the supernatural life their
final historic expression. There is some-
thing majestic in the sweep of this, the first
real philosophy of human history; the tale
it tells is sombre enough, but dramatic
in its idyllic opening, its tragic plot, its

188 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

tremendous denouement, and possessed
through its starthng contrasts and remorse-
less consistency of a grandeur really awe-
some.. The imagination is stirred by the
thought of the Christian sage who, in the
closing years of the Roman Empire, with
civihzation crumbling beneath his feet,
with disorder and carnage all about him,
surveys with untroubled eye the whole
course of human history from creation until
the end of the world. Looking back over
the recent period of ancient history to re-
moter prehistoric times, he sees in the rise
and fall of kingdoms nothing but the vain
and futile strivings of the Empire of This
World, necessarily transient and marked
by sin and sorrow. Turning his gaze for-
ward and peering into the future, which to
the natural vision is dark and menacing,
with its threat of barbarian inundation and
civilization extinguished, his eye remains
serene and untroubled, for his spiritual
vision foresees the triumphant progress of
the Church, the City of God, in her vie-

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 189

torious warfare with all worldly principali-
ties and powers.

Thus the thought of mediaeval Chris-
tianity found the key to the meaning of
universal history in the divine plan of
redemption. In perfect consistency with
the standpoint of supematuralism, it was
in this way enabled to explain all existing
facts teleologically, through their bearing
upon the supreme concern of man's salva-
tion. Causal determination, which for nat-
uralism was a sufficient explanation of
everything that happened, was by super-
naturalism almost entirely ignored. In the
causal sequences which relate natural events
among themselves, supematuralism had lit-
tle if any interest, and not the slightest
tendency to explore them; these events oc-
curred only to fulfil God's will, and this
divine purpose furnished their complete
explanation. Such objects and events as
could not by any stretch of the imagination
be thought of as means to the one great end
were interpreted as emblems or symbols of

190 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

great spiritual truths connected with hu-
man redemption. No more striking exem-
pUfication can be found of the power of an
intellectual presupposition completely to
dominate human thought and to exclude all
other interests. Blind to the most ele-
mentary facts of nature, mediaeval thought
found food for endless speculation in its
supposed symbolism. The eagle, the dove,
the serpent, the lion, about whose structures
and Ufe-habits there was profoundest igno-
rance, were nevertheless dwelt upon as
symbols of spiritual objects and spiritual
processes. The sea, about whose bound-
aries, depths, and tides next to nothing was
known, was interesting as a symbol of the
human heart tossed about by gusts of pas-
sion, traversed by waves of impulse.

Of the faults of supernaturalism little
more need be said. The type of life en-
couraged by its principles and ideals has
already been indicated. With all its faults,
it has a splendor of its own, witnessing as it
does to the power of the ideal over the

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 191

human soul. While its one-sidedness and
exaggeration doomed it to certain decay,
it constitutes a necessary stage in human
progress, since it achieved results of per-
manent value. It enlarged the horizons of
human life by creating for the will of man
the ideal of a spiritual good, an eternal life,
which in spite of his return to nature and
worldly pursuits he can never forget nor
cease to yearn after. Nor should the effi-
cacy of supernaturahsm as a civilizing
agency during the dark ages of transition
and turmoil be overlooked or underesti-
mated. For those who were permitted by
circumstances to make the most of their
spiritual opportunities in pursuit of a relig-
ious vocation, it meant, as we have seen,
withdrawal from the Ufe of action and of
service to the seclusion of the monastery,
where free from all worldly distractions
they could continue by meditation and by
prayer to fit themselves for the heavenly
Ufe. Action entered these cloistered lives
only in connection with the ritual and ser-

192 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

vice of the Church. Such a Ufe, pursued
by all members of the race, would of course
have brought human existence and with it
human progress to a speedy close. But,
fortunately, the great majority of men
could not thus make reUgion a vocation.
It was, rather, an addition to their every-
day lives — ^lives that in those turbulent
times were vivid and absorbing enough.
Moreover, the barbarians of northern Eu-
rope, whom it was the mission of the Church
to educate and civilize, did not possess
powers of reflective thought or logical for-
mulation sufficient to give such ideas of
spiritual reaUty as they might be led to
form any revolutionary significance. Their
natural interest in the world of every-day
affairs was not disturbed by the beliefs they
acquired concerning the supernatural. The
supernatural world was to them another
world added to this one — a celestial realm,
it is true, but in fundamental structure
analogous to the life on earth. God was its
monarch, mightier than any earthly poten-

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 193

tate, but resembling in all essentials the
monarchs of this world. But the existence
of the celestial world and the prospect of a
supernatural Ufe furnished powerful incen-
tives to right conduct — ^and this was a very
important matter.

As an attempt to provide complete and
final satisfaction for the human will, the
supernatural Hfe did not, even with the re-
inforcement of rehgious belief, succeed.
The problem of evil, still unsolved, re-
mained as the reef destined to wreck this
third type of life with its high pretensions
and lofty ideals. The attempt of mediaeval
Christianity to overcome actual evils, nat-
ural and social, by ignoring them was an
utter failure. Inattention to natural ob-
jects and ignorance of natural laws brought
a heavy penalty of suffering and degrada-
tion. Disease raged unchecked because the
laws of health were neglected; famine
threatened because the methods of produc-
tion were unimproved; disasters from fire
and flood and storm were unabated, be-

194 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

cause ignorance of natural causes made
precaution and prevention impossible.
Thus supernaturalism as a mode of living
defeated its own ends, for many lives with
splendid spiritual possibilities were pre-
maturely cut off, or spiritually deadened,
by hardship and pain. In the social
sphere, also, the inabihty of supernaturalism
to remove the conflict of interests among
individuals and bring about a fair adjust-
ment, proved destructive of its own aims.
Its failure to establish social justice is noto-
rious; it encouraged the growth of spiritual
aristocracy, and ultimately of a social aris-
tocracy as well. Unable to pursue the life
of worship and prayer and communion
which the religious vocation required, un-
less freed from the toil and care of providing
for physical sustenance and comfort, those
who were prompted to seek the fruits of
the spiritual Ufe grew increasingly willing to
receive their support from the labor of the
greater number who were condemned to
toil unceasingly, without opportunity for a

THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE 195

rudimentary spiritual culture. And when
this spiritual aristocracy found it could
make its position more secure politically
by alliance with an hereditary social aris-
tocracy which gained the chance for intel-
lectual and aesthetic culture through sub-
jecting the mass of men to the hmitations
of inferior social status, and then appropri-
ating the products of their labor, it did not
hesitate to do so. Nay more, the repre-
sentatives of supernaturalism were willing
to strengthen the authority of a corrupt
social aristocracy by hypocritically admon-
ishing the subject classes to be content with
their lot, since earthly possessions and plea-
sures were transient and unreal, while heav-
enly bhss was the sure reward of every
man who proved submissive to the powers
of Church and state. Become thus the
apologist for social injustice, supernatural-
ism was certain to fall, and its fall was de-
served.

But supernaturalism is not simply su-
perseded in the onward march of human

196 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

progress. Its results are assimilated; they
become a permanent acquisition of human
nature. Man, upon whom the spiritual
vision has once dawned, never entirely es-
capes from its uplifting influence. The light
of the eternal, having once shone upon
the scene of earth, leaves it with altered
perspective and enlarged horizons. The
appeal of the supernatural may only be felt
on special occasions, but it leaves us per-
manently upHfted and ennobled. Perhaps
it is when we behold some sublime natural
spectacle or simply view a peaceful sunset
sky, possibly it is when we are stirred by
the beauty and majesty of a great cathedral
or join joyfully in the worship of Christmas
or Easter tide — on such rare occasions the
concerns of every-day life retreat into the
background of shadow and our souls rise
up and lay hold on eternal reality.

CHAPTER V

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE

Human progress is due to the irresistible
expansive power of the human will; un-
daunted by failure, it turns every defeat
into a victory by striving with renewed
faith to conquer and annex still more ex-
tensive fields of satisfaction. Failing to
obtain the objects of present desire, it seeks
to make sure of future well-being and enjoy-
ment. Thwarted in this attempt to pro-
vide for future security and comfort, it
abandons the natural world in an heroic
attempt to attain an abiding supernatural
good. Unable thus to take heaven by
storm, it endeavors to realize an end which
shall unite both natural and supernatural
goods — aiming in this new venture at once
to convert material acquisitions into a
means of spiritual attainment, and to de-

197

198 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

rive from spiritual sources power for the
transformation of natural conditions. This
final end, which may fitly be termed univer-
sal, is sought by the modern spirit.

It is easy to misunderstand the modern
spirit as merely a relapse into naturalism.
For we seem to see the modem world ab-
sorbed in an attempt to secure material
convenience and enjoyment through the
control of physical forces and the direction
of social influences. But this interpretation
stops at the surface and utterly fails to
understand the great underlying principles
of modem civilization. The modern spirit
diflfers from naturalism, first in the ideal
which it proposes for realization, and, sec-
ond, in the method by which it undertakes
to realize this ideal.

The ideal of modern civilization is not
limited, like that of naturalism, to the sat-
isfactions of individual existence and com-
munity life. The good which it seeks ex-
tends in its range beyond the narrow boun-
daries of local community interest to the

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 199

larger national life, and the life of the mod-
ern nation presents a variety of activities
almost endless and a complexity of interests
well-nigh infinite. But it overleaps, also,
the limits of national welfare, and embraces
international comity and well-being, ex-
tending thus to the lives of all men of every
race and clime. Nor does it confine itself
to the humanity of the present age or gen-
eration, but has regard for man's develop-
ment and satisfaction throughout the long
reaches of the future. Man's effort to at-
tain by sheer force of spiritual insight to a
supernatural reality proves to be not a
disorderly dream, forgotten on awakening;
it leaves him with an outlook permanently
altered. For the human will in the broad
light of modern day still seeks a spiritual
kingdom, not a Heavenly City perhaps, but a
spiritual community whose life shall furnish
to every man the opportunity for per-
sonal development and satisfaction. More-
over, Christian other-worldliness and ascet-
icism have left their permanent mark upon

200 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

the moral will of the modern man; for deep-
rooted in his heart the conviction abides
that the highest human good has a content
so comprehensive, so far-reaching, as to
demand the surrender of every individual
interest. The profound Christian doctrine
of self-sacrifice is firmly intrenched in mod-
ern ethics. Modern humanitarianism is
occasionally disparaged as visionary and
sentimental, as the well-meant but ab-
surdly impracticable proposal to make
everybody materially prosperous and
happy. But to treat with superior or cyn-
ical disdain this ideal, even in its cruder
expressions, is to play the traitor to man's
highest interest, for in its universalism it
represents the noblest aspiration of the
human will.

In the method of realizing its ideal, mod-
ernism returns to grapple anew with physi-
cal forces and social conditions. Here we
do have a return to naturalism — but with a
noteworthy difference. The natural man
seeks, through observing and utilizing the

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 201

obvious sequences of nature, to reach the
results at which he aims. Modem inteUi-
gence, on the contrary, proposes through
study and experiment to analyze physical
forces and social tendencies into their ele-
mentary components, and then to recom-
bine them in such a way that they shall
with unfailing certainty produce the results
which universal human welfare requires.

Modern civilization is the vastest enter-
prise ever undertaken by the human will.
Supernaturalism was a bold venture, it is
true; it wins our admiration through the
very height of its pretensions. But since
the supernatural good was exalted far above
all worldly events and concerns, it took on
an exclusive character, shutting out from
its ken the disturbing refractory forces of
nature and all such human individuals as
possessed neither intellectual grasp nor
spiritual insight. Its ideal was the Ufe of a
spiritual aristocracy. In contrast to this,
the end sought by the moral will which is
behind modern civilization appalls by its

202 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

very scope and magnitude. It proposes to
utilize every natural force, every social in-
fluence, in the establishment of a social
community whose life shall be large and
varied enough to provide for the develop-
ment and satisfaction of every human indi-
vidual. Here in this final stage of human
progress we behold the human will ventur-
ing to seek a life which is truly universal.

The faith which the pursuit of such a
universal good calls for on the part of
modern man is greater than that hitherto
exercised by the human will. The faith
characteristic of supernaturalism is noble,
ardent, pure — surpassing in these quahties
any previous aspiration of man. This
noble purity, this consuming zeal, is the
result of whole-souled devotion to a sublime
spiritual ideal. But supernaturalism is able
to continue absorbed in its lofty ideal only
because it deliberately disregards a large
part of human experience. Its exalted op-
timism is achieved only through blindness
to the ills and imperfections of the actual

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 20S

world. A faith stronger than that of Stoic
sage or mediaeval mystic is, therefore, re-
quired of one who faces the facts of the ex-
isting world, who understands its contra-
dictions and maladjustments, its cruel and
clumsy processes, its bloodshed and car-
nage, its brutality and cunning; and yet
dares to believe that it may be made a
means to the realization of a universal
spiritual ideal. To look without flinching
upon the facts of existence, to maintain
the possibility of converting the agencies
of nature into instruments of personal de-
velopment and to undertake the task of
realizing the Ideal in the actual world, calls
for a faith so resolute, a fortitude so unfal-
tering as to daunt any but the strongest
will.

The postulate through which this faith
gains expression is that of development or
evolution — that the actual world contains
"potencies of adaptation and growth, of which
human intelligence may avail itself in the
establishment of a universal spiritual life.

204 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

This is the last and highest of the four pos-
tulates upon which human progress rests.
Primitive Hfe depends upon belief in the
existence of things which are centres and
sources of characteristic qualities. The
natural life owes its advance over primitive
conditions to the further belief that events
are determined in their occurrence by pre-
vious events, their causes. The supernat-
ural life is made possible by the added be-
lief to which reflection gives rise, that
objects and events owe their character to
the ends they subserve. The universal life
rests upon a final and culminating belief
in development or self-determination — a be-
lief that objects derive actuality and signifi-
cance not simply from the causes which
produce them or from the ends which they
subserve, but also from their own intrinsic
potencies of growth and expression; that
actual objects are in a real and important
sense self-caused in that they are capable,
under stress of inner tension or outer stimu-
lus, of manifesting new qualities and powers.

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 205

This capacity for growth and self-develop-
ment is strikingly manifested in the organic
realm by the multitude of forms and the
variety of activities originated by the life-
force — ^forms and activities which in ap-
pearance are new and, from previous
observation, unpredictable. But this ca-
pacity for self-development comes first to
full expression as the power of freedom and
creativity in the mind and will of man. It
is the principle of progress itself, and its
final adoption as a ruling belief by the
human will means that the spirit of prog-
ress has finally become seK-conscious. Ex-
plicitly adopted as a postulate, it means
that the human will has come to conscious
recognition of its power of originating new
ends for pursuit and of discovering in actual
objects and conditions new possibilities of
service and satisfaction.

Human volition, at the present high-
water mark of its development, thus aims
at such adjustment of forces in nature and
such organization of interests in society as

206 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

will make possible the establishment of a
universal social life. This is pre-eminently
a programme of action, and it is a fact that
modern civilization is distinguished from
medisevalism by its abandonment of con-
templation for action. In its emphasis
upon accomplishment and efficiency the
modern spirit harks back to the "practi-
caUty" of naturalism, and seems to the ex-
ponent of classical culture to savor not a
little of the Phihstinism of the natural man.
But, as we have seen, there is this impor-
tant difference: the action required by the
modern ideal is not a comparatively simple
routine based upon empirical observation,
but is experimental and constructive, be-
cause guided by systematic reflection and
creative imagination. In fact, the achieve-
ments of modern civiUzation in the sub-
jugation of nature and the reorganization
of society are due directly to developed
thought and trained imagination, a devel-
opment and a training which man's intel-
lectual and imaginative faculties received

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 207

during the classical and mediaeval periods.
For if man is to make new combinations of
natural forces which shall produce results
serviceable to himself, he must first be able
to separate these forces, operating in a baf-
fling complexity, into their elementary con-
stituents. To do this he must not merely
observe, he must experiment. But in order
to experiment he must be able beforehand
to frame in his thought the questions whose
answer he is to seek from nature. Now to
ask intelligent questions requires an initial
conception of a subject or situation and a
provisional analysis of it. Such exercise of
conceptual thought and analytic under-
standing hes, consequently, at the very
source of modern technical achievement.
Kepler's epoch-making discovery of the
laws which govern planetary revolution was
made possible by his initial conception of
the universe as ordered by definite quanti-
tative relations. Proceeding upon this view
and with a knowledge of mathematical
principles, he attempted to conceive of

208 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

every possible relation that might apply to
the orbit of the planets. This provisional
analysis supplied him with a set of hypothe-
ses, each of which might constitute a ques-
tion to which observed facts would return
answer. An observation, thus originating
in an hypothesis and returning answer to a
question, is essentially experimental. When
the conditions under which an event occurs
are so controlled that any observer may
vary them at will, thus testing every con-
ceivable hypothesis in regard to their rela-
tion to the event in question, we have, in
the complete sense of the term, an experi-
ment.

This work of separating the forces of na-
ture into their elementary constituents, and
of determining their essential relations, is,
of course, but a preliminary to the task of
recombining them in such ways that they
may produce results which increase the
satisfaction and enlarge the scope of human
life. In this field of invention, mechanical
and social, the will of man has scored its

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 209

most notable triumphs in modern times.
New machinery of production and distribu-
tion, of transportation and communication,
has revolutionized the economic and indus-
trial hfe of man; new agencies of govern-
ment and education, of relief and recrea-
tion, have reorganized his social life. There
is no fitter symbol of modern progress than
the machine. To assert this is, in the
opinion of many people, tantamount to a
condemnation of modernism. The promi-
nence of machinery in modern hfe they
regard as an ominous indication that human
society is being materialized. Such is a
mistaken view, however; the invention and
use of machinery means, or should mean,
not that human hfe is being materialized,
but that the material world is being spir-
itualized. For what does the invention of
a useful machine signify? It means that
physical forces, which have hitherto acted
separately and without regard for human
welfare, are so combined and adjusted by
human intelhgence as to produce a new

210 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

result, and one that is desired by man to
enrich the content of his Ufe. It means
that a number of physical forces, each of
which has always been and continues to
be determined by other forces, quite regard-
less of man's needs or purposes, are bound
together by a new relationship which man
imposes upon them when he makes them
means to one end. In this way the un-
certainty, the untrustworthiness of natural
processes which rendered futile man's pre-
vious attempts to avail himself of their
causal sequences in providing for his own
future, and finally made him despair of
attaining any natural good, is overcome.
For this earlier effort of man to control
nature in his own interest had for its gui-
dance only his observation of the more
obvious sequences of natural events — an
observation that necessarily failed to reveal
all the conditions of an event, to detect
those that were hidden, and to distinguish
the part played by each. Hence the effect
that he expected would follow, and upon

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE «11

which his own plans depended, was con-
tinually failing to appear, because of the
absence of some necessary condition of
which he was ignorant. He knew that the
growth of the seed he had planted was con-
ditioned by a loosening of the soil and the
presence of moisture and heat and light,
but he did not know that the existence of
certain elements in the soil was also a nec-
essary condition. Hence his crop often
failed unaccountably, and in consequence
he went hungry. But modern science, by
its exact analysis of all the conditions under
which natural events occur is giving man
certain control, and the assurance of suc-
cess, in obtaining results from nature.
Now the machine represents this control in
the acme of perfection. For here exact
analysis is made the basis of a new synthe-
sis or readjustment of natural forces, with
the sole purpose of obtaining from them a
certain result. The machine typifies, there-
fore, the conquest of matter by intelligence
— its genuine spiritualization. It is not

212 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

merely that natural processes are subjected
to a new kind of determination, however;
that certain forces which were determined
before by antecedent conditions are now
determined by subsequent events, by re-
sults, that is, which now they are bound
to produce. That kind of teleology is al-
ready present in nature, inasmuch as every
event is not merely the effect of a cause,
but determined itself to produce an effect.
No, in the machine the action of natural
forces is also determined by their inherent,
but as yet unrealized, potencies of render-
ing intelligent service. The invention of
machinery is a contribution to universal
progress because by it the material uni-
verse is made to display capabilities hither-
to unknown, of furthering the development
of self-conscious personality.

The co-operation of thought with action
in extending the control of man over the
forces of his natural environment has pro-
duced results extremely advantageous to
thought itself, and stimulating to its devel-

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 213

opment. For, among other achievements,
modern invention has devised appUances
for experiment and investigation which have
led to an enormous increase in man's intel-
lectual power. Modern invention has given
to science the laboratory with its marvellous
apparatus for discovering the hidden se-
crets of nature. Laboratory instruments
and procedure make possible the exhaustive
analysis and precise measurement of nat-
ural forces. They are enabling scientists to
reduce all changes in the physical universe
to terms of motion, and to measure the di-
rection and velocity of this motion. This
translation of the natural world, with its
multitude of objects varying in interest
and significance into mechanical terms, fills
many minds with apprehension and dismay.
It seems to them to mean the eUmination
of all value and freedom from our human
world and its replacement by matter and
mechanism, the veritable shackling of man
in the iron chains of physical necessity.
But the true idealist whose first concern is

214 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

the real spiritual progress of humanity has
no cause for alarm or regret; rather should
he welcome the advance of exact physical
science. For the reduction of all natural
change to terms of motion means that all
physical processes can be formulated in
mathematical terms, their fundamental laws
and relations made out — can, in fact, be
calculated and controlled. Modern physi-
cal science is thus preparing the way for
the complete conquest of matter by rational
will. The progress of laboratory science
proves, if you will, that nature, as it now
exists, is not spiritual — ^but who that es-
teems spiritual values would wish to admit
that it is! But it does give us reason to
hope that the natural world may by effort
and contrivance be spiritualized — and this
is all that the true ideahst could desire.

Modern civilization seeks to attain its
end through the instrumentality of both
thought and action. These two capacities
become, therefore, fully spiritualized, for
they are both made means to the develop-

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 215

ment of a universal personal life. It is true
that supernaturalism conceived of thought
as an agency for realizing an Absolute
Good: the exercise of reason was believed to
reveal to man the Absolute Truth and to
show him his place in Universal Reality.
But this truth was conceived abstractly,
and the reality which it revealed was one
divorced from the facts of human experience.
The exercise of reason has not been neg-
lected by the modern spirit; devotion to pure
science has been a leading characteristic of
modern civiUzation. But modern thought
has sought to discover the facts of the
actual world, and in this undertaking it has
met with astonishing success. Its ultimate
aim is Absolute Truth, to be sure; a com-
pleted system of ideas which shall represent
every real object. The facts of the exist-
ing world do not permit of such representa-
tion, however, until they have been brought
actually within the scope of personal life,
and to accomplish this is the task of action.
And it is man's power of action, however.

216 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

that has undergone the most remarkable
expansion in modern times. This capacity
was neglected and despised by supernatu-
ralism, as we have seen. In the still lower
stage, when man was interested altogether
in obtaining and enjoying natural goods, it
was Umited to the employment of a few
natural forces and the fashioning of rela-
tively simple tools. Hence the tendency
still exists to disparage this faculty as of
solely utiUtarian value, and as having no
place in true personal development. But
to take this view is to blind oneself to the
most notable achievement of modern times.
For the modem world has seen technical ac-
tivity raised to the level of personal achieve-
ment by being given a universal scope and
significance. The aim of modern invention
in both the mechanical and the social fields
is to make such adjustments and adapta-
tions of existing materials and forces as
shall turn them into means of universal
human development. Such are railways
and steamships, which make possible whole-

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 217

sale transportation; telegraph and tele-
phone, which facilitate general communica-
tion; such are postal service, pubUc school
system, labor unions, state insurance, etc.
— all permanent instruments of human bet-
terment. Thus the man who invents a
new coupling device, a new serum, an im-
proved method of street-cleaning, realizes
not a material but a spiritual good; for
through his action his will is identified with
the universal social Ufe. Feeling, whose
contribution to human progress is often
forgotten, has also become in modern times
an agency of universal progress. The
yearning of the human will for an absolute
and eternal good was a potent influence in
leading men to abandon all natural inter-
ests in order to seek a supernatural good.
The feehng which inspires the modern ser-
vant of humanity is no less noble, if less
ecstatic. Its scope is, in fact, more truly
universal, because more genuinely compre-
hensive; it is a broad and fundamental sym-
pathy with humanity universally, a su-

218 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

preme enthusiasm for human development,
and a profound interest in every action
which promises to further this end.

Returning now to the end sought by the
moral will which is moving in modern civ-
ilization, we have found ample reason for
regarding it as spiritual. It is spiritual be-
cause it represents the complete satisfaction
of the human will in the greatest possible
expansion of man's personaUty. This life
is universal because it comprehends, in the
sense of making room for, the personal
development of every human individual.
This ideal of modem humanitarianism was,
of course, foreshadowed by the Stoic con-
ception of a perfect society and the mediae-
val ideal of a spiritual kingdom. But these
former ideals are static — the perfect society,
the spiritual community which they en-
visaged was one already realized by the
will of God, and elevated in its eternal per-
fection far above the confused and frag-
mentary existence of earth. The modern
ideal is, on the contrary, dynamic^ is that

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 219

of an expanding spiritual system, a develop-
ing society of free persons. It exists not
realized, but to be realized. It is the ob-
ject not of contemplation but of action; it
promises not the peace of fulfilment but
the sword of adventure and achievement.
Thus the modern moral ideal has received
concrete embodiment in the aims of De^
mocracy — ^aims which begin, with much hesi-
tation and after many discouragements, to
be reaHzed.

The aim of democracy is to give equal
opportunities for self-expression and satis-
faction to all its citizens. It seeks to estab-
lish a social life which shall furnish to every
individual who participates in it full scope
for personal development; the individual in
rendering his service to society gains com-
plete self-reahzation. This means that the
will of each individual shall achieve the
maximum of expansion in the three fields
of its exercise — ^thought, action, and feel-
ing. All citizens will therefore share in the
attainment of the supreme personal good

220 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

in its threefold expression, as Truth and
Power and Beauty. These ends are by
nature universal; they can be attained only
in a community of intelligence; they imply
the associated activity of a community of
free persons. The ideal of democracy is
thus that of a "perfect society." But this
ideal can be realized only under the actual
conditions of human existence; it is the
great achievement of the modern spirit
to have recognized this fundamental fact.
The forces of nature must be so controlled
and employed as to furnish all individuals
with the means of health and comfort; the
varied and conflicting interests of individ-
uals must be so adjusted as to make due
place for the legitimate activity of each
one. Now, democracy will not permit the
burden of this, the work of the world, to
fall upon the shoulders of one class of its
citizens, in order that another shall be
given leisure and freedom for higher per-
sonal development. Such an arrangement
would violate its fundamental principle of

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 221

universal and equal opportunity. No, de-
mocracy, on the contrary, insists that the
weight of the world's work shall be borne
by all. Its only recourse, therefore, if it is
to realize its ideal under conditions of earth,
is so to organize the work of economic pro-
duction and social adjustment that it may
yield to all participants the absolute moral
values above mentioned. Truth and Power
and Beauty, expressions of that universal
hfe for which his will yearns, must be dis-
covered and attained by man in the course
of his every-day occupations, in sowing and
reaping, in building and carrying, in buying
and selling, in teaching and heaUng. This
task, which the hard facts of existence im-
pose upon the will of man, modern civiliza-
tion beheves to be possible of attainment.
Our democratic societies give evidence that
it is at least possible to realize the ideal by
idealizing the actual. A wide dissemination
of knowledge made possible by popular ed-
ucation and free discussion is found to facili-
tate industry and government, besides being

222 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

a permanent means of self-expression with
citizens; a large increase of power over
forces both physical and social, due to the
co-operative use of machinery, has resulted
in a great improvement of man's living
conditions, besides giving to his activity
that added range and scope which it ever
craves; a great extension of sympathy, due
to mutual understanding and co-operation,
has made men more helpful as fellow
laborers and more agreeable as fellow citi-
zens, besides opening inexhaustible sources
of satisfaction in the appreciation of beauty
in nature and in character. The three su-
preme ideals, as they are concretely realized
in a democratic society, appear as mutual
understanding, co-operation, and sympathy.
Mutual understanding is the very corner-
stone of democracy. It is possible to found
a stable society which shall subserve moral
ends because expressing the general will
only when there is general enlightenment
and understanding. Knowledge, to be mor-
ally eflFective, to promote personal develop-

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 223

ment universally, cannot remain the exclu-
sive possession of a few; it must become the
common property of all. Hence, while the
scientific expert must be employed by a
democratic society, he will be compelled to
explain his methods and justify his results
to his fellow citizens. The only way in
which a man with special knowledge can
gain exceptional influence is by persuading
the public of the truth of his views, or at
least of his competence to decide. Free
discussion and popular education are the
life's breath of democracy. Modern intelli-
gence and technical skill have been amaz-
ingly successful in the contrivance of meth-
ods and the invention of machinery for the
dissemination of knowledge. The exten-
sion of the franchise, safe only where there
is an equal extension of knowledge, is itself
a notable educational measure; for it gives
to the ignorant an occasion and incentive
for the acquisition of information, and im-
pels those who know to enlighten their less
inteUigent fellows. PoUtical campaigns and

224 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

elections, awakening general interest in
large national questions and leading to
public discussions and debates, are effective
agencies for the spread of ideas and the in-
crease of understanding. The public-school
system is the mainstay of popular govern-
ment, insuring that benefits gained by so-
ciety in the present shall be conserved and
enlarged by future generations. Public li-
braries, with their stores of books and peri-
odicals for general use, the modern news-
paper, with its marvellous facilities for the
gathering and publication of news, assist in
this work of enlightenment. Railways and
steamboats, making travel speedy and com-
fortable, enable people to meet, converse,
and keep in personal touch with one an-
other. Improved postal service, the tele-
graph, and the telephone are additional in-
struments of communication which aid in
the great work of promoting general knowl-
edge and mutual understanding. Merely
an enumeration of methods and agencies is
suflBcient to show one how vast and how

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 225

successful is the work of education and en-
lightenment carried on by a modern demo-
cratic society. And the result attained —
general knowledge of the facts of Ufe and
the world, with an understanding of the
points of view of other men — is a perma-
nent means of self -development and satis-
faction.

Co-operation is the second feature neces-
sary to the life of a democratic society, but
possessed, also, of supreme moral worth.
It is plain that the work of modern democ-
racy in the economic and social fields can be
carried on only through the co-operative
eflFort of its citizens. It is also apparent
that co-operation of hand if not of soul does
prevail in modern industry and govern-
ment. To the division of labor which gave
to diflFerent individuals different occupations
there has been added, through the introduc-
tion of machinery, a differentiation of func-
tion much more minute and thoroughgo-
ing, organizing workers into groups within
groups, and giving to the individual the

226 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

most definite and specialized of tasks. The
work of government in a great democracy
has also become so immensely enlarged and
exceedingly intricate as to be saved from
confusion only by an elaborate organization
which involves at once highest specialization
and completest interdependence. Modern
society has secured at least the semblance
of co-operation in its industrial and political
organization, but it is to be feared that the
co-operation is in most cases a matter of
outward form and does not touch the inner
soul and spirit. The division of labor re-
quired by the use of machinery along with
modem factory methods too often merely
condemns the individual to the monotonous
repetition of an utterly insignificant task,
without producing in him any realizing
sense of the power and efficiency of the
whole enterprise to which he contributes.
It is one of the pressing duties of democracy
to remedy this condition, and so to reorgan-
ize its industries and enterprises that their
working shall yield this fundamental moral

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 227

value. This end will not be gained by the
abandonment of machinery and the meth-
ods of manufacture and transportation to
which its employment have led. On the
contrary, it is in the invention of more
machinery and the further extension of its
use that the hope of reaching an ultimate
solution of the problem chiefly lies. For
we may hope that in time all the dangerous
and deadening tasks may be given over to
machinery; no class of unfortunates will be
compelled by circumstances to perform
them. The work of men, in the sphere
of industry and commerce at least, will
consist almost entirely in the control of
machinery, and this work they must do
together. With the conditions of labor im-
proved and the mode of living bettered, it
remains to produce among the workers the
spirit of co-operation. A movement in this
direction seems to be developing out of the
recent efiiciency propaganda. For it is
seen with increasing clearness that efficiency
cannot be secured by attention to physical

228 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

factors alone, by the elimination of all waste
of power and material. The human factor
must also be considered — ^the personality of
the workers must be taken into account.
Each individual must be given the task
most congenial to his taste and fitted to
his abihty; then he must be encouraged to
make the most of its possibilities. But
most of all, industries must be so managed
as to enlist the interest and arouse the loy-
alty of the workers. They must come to
feel a sense of personal ownership in the
machinery, to be thrilled by its power, to
take satisfaction in its productions. To
this consciousness they have a moral right,
because the machinery is an invention of
human intelligence, an achievement of the
rational will which is striving in all men.
When the individual thus identifies the in-
dustry or enterprise with his own will his
fellow workers become his partners, united
not by their common antagonism to those
who "own" or direct the enterprise, but by
their common interest in and devotion to it.

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 229

In this way the life of the individual be-
comes truly universaHzed; his powers of
action receive their rightful satisfaction
through participating in the successful effort
of man's intelligence to control the condi-
tions of his existence.

Besides general enlightenment and recip-
rocal service, a whole-hearted sympathy
among fellow citizens is implied in the very
existence of democracy. With the devel-
opment of a democratic society this fellow-
feeling broadens and deepens, and it is mani-
festly to the interest of such society to
encourage and foster this growth imtil it be-
comes the genuine emotion of brotherhood.
There is no more effective method of pro-
moting the concord of feeling among all
sorts and conditions of men than by ena-
bHng them to enjoy together the same beau-
ties in works of nature and of art. For a
distinguishing feature of the feeling of
aesthetic appreciation is its disinterested-
ness. The sense of beauty is awakened by
harmonies and proportions in objects that

230 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

appeal to the perceptive and imaginative
faculties of men in an identical or similar
manner. Thus by the establishment of
parks and art-galleries, through the mainte-
nance of playgrounds and the encourage-
ment of architecture, through wise city
planning and the preservation of rural
scenery, we provide permanent sources of
emotional concord among the members of
society. And, associated thus in the same
experience of aesthetic enjoyment, individ-
uals are drawn together, are led to consider
and admire characteristics perceived in one
another. This appreciation of nobilities of
character which is the basis of true love, is
itself fostered by some of the arts, notably
poetry and music. In verse and song the
noble qualities and splendid achievements of
national heroes are celebrated, and a multi-
tude of individuals are made one by the
responsive thrill which such poetry and
music awaken. Thus the development of
civic consciousness and corporate feeling
among fellow citizens leads to the realization

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE ^31

by the human will of Beauty and Love, ends
of universal scope and capable of affording
abiding satisfaction.

The moral will of modern man is seeking
and, we find, is beginning to attain, an end
which is genuinely universal. Genuinely,
because concretely, universal in the sense of
being all-comprehensive, a social life which
provides for the possible personal develop-
ment of all individuals in a completely civ-
ilized world. This undertaking of the mod-
ern spirit depends, as we have seen, upon
faith — ^faith that existing facts and forces
can all of them be adapted to the fulfilment
of man's personal needs. Such faith, we
must also acknowledge, has been in a large
measure justified by the achievements to
which it has led, by the amazing success of
modern man in readjusting natural forces
and reorganizing social institutions, with a
view to his own larger personal satisfaction.
Modern technical science has come to think
of the natural universe not as a dead-weight
of inert matter driven by equally blind

232 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

forces through endlessly repeated cycles of
monotonous change, but as a great store-
house of unknown potencies, itself progres-
sive, and containing limitless possibilities of
further growth under the impulsion and con-
trol of intelligence. May we not, then,
suppose that man has come within sight of
the goal of his own progress? Is not the
roadway at last cleared and open for the
rapid advance of human vohtion to its own
final and complete satisfaction? Have we
not found the long-sought solution of the
problems of human life and human destiny
which have vexed man's spirit from the be-
ginning of his career, in the modern pro-
gramme of social progress through the bet-
terment of human living conditions, both
economic and social ?

Before assenting to this optimistic view
which is widely current in these days of
evolutionary science, we must stop to con-
sider certain facts that loom large and cast
deep shadows in the path of modern prog-
ress. In the first place, we must admit that

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 288

modern man's control over nature is pur-
chased at a staggering cost. The wonderful
discoveries and inventions, the gigantic en-
terprises and vast undertakings of modern
civilization have resulted in an incalculable
amount of suffering and a countless number
of premature deaths among human indi-
viduals. That such inventions and enter-
prises prevent suffering and loss of Ufe — ^in
most cases far more than they cause — is
freely admitted. But neither can it be
denied that they have brought with them
new perils, new possibihties of disaster.
The steamship, the steam railway, electric
traction and illumination, the automobile,
agencies of civilization and means of human
betterment that they are, contribute each
one of them to the growing number of acci-
dental injuries and deaths that occur, par-
ticularly in our crowded centres of popula-
tion. And when we turn to such enterprises
as modern mining and bridge-building and
tunnelling, the toll of life and limb paid by
the workers is appalling. Of course it is

234 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

reasonable to hope that in the future the
dangers and disasters which follow upon
the employment of mechanical instruments
may be lessened by further inventions.
But suppose — which seems unlikely — that,
by ingenuity, man is able to eliminate en-
tirely the accidents which follow upon the
employment of machinery by human soci-
ety. This risk of injury and death must
still be run by the inventor, the discoverer,
the explorer, through whose intelligence and
inventive skill society acquires the means of
betterment. One who elicits hitherto un-
known potencies of nature by chancing new
combinations of her forces must frequently
be prepared to stake his life in the venture.
The discovery of a new serum costs the life
of a devoted investigator; knowledge of a
new explosive is purchased at the expense of
a dozen killed and injured. The loss of the
Titanic reminded civilized society that every
step forward in the conquest of the sea is
purchased at a considerable expense of hu-
man life; the same is true of modern railway

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 235

travel; the cost of conquering the air prom-
ises to be greatest of all. A colossal enter-
prise Uke the Panama Canal puts a prema-
ture end to hundreds if not to thousands of
human careers; railways built to open rich
tropical forests are flanked by the graves of
the men who labored to construct them; we
accept it as a matter of course that a great
bridge or aqueduct or tunnel should take a
life or two. Such penalty man has to pay
for his success in harnessing the forces of
nature to the chariot of his progress; it is
inconceivable that in the future he should
be able to continue his conquests except
at a similar cost. Imagine, however, what
seems to be impossible; that he should de-
vise means of continuing his transformation
of nature in perfect safety to himself. It is
impossible to imagine him by any skill or
invention doing away with physical death,
and thus gaining for himself permanence of
life. And as long as death remains there is
conflict and antagonism between the natural
conditions of man's existence and his per-

FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

sonal needs — the conflict and antagonism in
which physical evil is rooted. The death of
an individual may evidently be for the bene-
fit of humanity; such is the case with many
individuals whose very death is a part of
their service to humanity^ — ^the heroes, the
patriots, the martyrs of all ages. The death
of all individuals may even be shown to be
in a certain sense favorable to the progress
of the race, since it makes life while it lasts
more intense, more significant. But these
considerations do not solve the problem for
the individual. His will demands a Ufe
which shall be universal in its scope, per-
manent in its achievement.

When we look from the physical to the
social sphere we find a similar situation.
That modern civilization is making progress
with the work of reorganizing society in
order to provide place for the different in-
dividuahties that may claim a part in its
life, is undeniable. But that this progress
is made at the cost of arousing new enmities
and oppositions, and without any certain

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 237

prospect of bringing about a complete rec-
onciliation of interests, is also apparent.
Modern social reform seeks so to recon-
struct institutions and revise laws as to
enforce the equal rights and the common
interest of all individuals. Its aim is an
adjustment so thoroughgoing that each in-
dividual may find in serving society a ful-
filment of his own ambition. But in many
cases the measures which are successful in
correcting grave injustice are themselves
productive of new conflict and discord.
Our present economic system of free con-
tract and free competition among individ-
uals was effective in maintaining the rights
of individuahty as against the injustice of
feudalism, but, as we all know, it has been
productive of ruthless greed and unscrupu-
lous rapacity. Free speech and a free press
were valuable instruments in freeing the
individual citizen from the oppression of
the tyrant and in developing a pubUc opin-
ion which is favorable to the recognition of
many larger social interests — but they have

238 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

given an unparalleled power to demagogues
and demagoguery. The social innovator or
reformer, like the inventor in the mechani-
cal realm, must be willing to take his life in
his hands. For he, through his experiments
and reconstructions, runs the risk, if not of
physical death, at least of loss of reputation
and property and peace of mind. For hu-
man beings are uncertain quantities, social
influences are elusive and incalculable, and
one who attempts to establish new relations
or make new adjustments is liable to reach
unexpected and disconcerting results. If
his attempt is successful he is given an hon-
ored place among the leaders of society; if
unsuccessful, his own natural regret over
his failure and wasted effort is made more
bitter by the reproaches and ridicule of his
fellows. Finally, experience gives us no
reason to expect that by a social adjust-
ment, no matter how complete, we can elim-
inate the necessity for self-sacrifice. When,
in its simpler and more obvious expressions,
it is rendered unnecessary by social prog-

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 239

ress, it reappears in subtler and more poign-
ant forms. Progress, economic and social,
may well secure such a plentiful production
and equitable distribution of the means of
subsistence that no individual need surren-
der his own possessions in order to relieve
the distress of his fellows. But the claims
of individuality will then assert themselves
in the higher sphere of personal achieve-
ment. The individual will be confronted
with the hard duty of giving up his oppor-
tunity for personal culture and achievement
in order to perform his share of the labor
required for the material support of man-
kind. The problem of self-sacrifice, the
conflict of egoism and altruism, appears in
the most acute and difficult form when the
individual is obliged to give up not material
possessions — ^for such surrender is frequently
a blessing in disguise — but all opportunity
for personal development and self-realiza-
tion in order to support and care for others.
In such cases the conditions of human exis-
tence seem to compel the individual to con-

240 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

sent to his own personal degradation in
order to save and succor his needy fellows.
Such conflicts between the claims of indi-
vidual culture and social service promise to
be the bitterest struggles of our future mo-
rahty; for democratic society provides for
the support of no special class privileged to
enjoy the fruits of personal culture, but in-
spires in the heart of every individual the
yearning for the larger personal develop-
ment. Self-sacrifice cannot be removed
from human hfe, therefore; because it is
rooted in the private and exclusive char-
acter of individuaUty, and thus cannot be
destroyed without destroying human nature
itself.

Finally, we have to admit that the exten-
sion of human interests to cover the entire
world, which is a distinguishing mark of
modem civilization, has made possible evils
of whose magnitude men have had until
now only a dim foreboding, but which we
in these years can realize in their dread
actuaUty. The modern will, when true to

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 241

its professed universality, seeks world bet-
terment. Hence, when citizens of a mod-
ern state devote themselves to national wel-
fare, it should be with the understanding
that the nation which they serve is a mem-
ber of the family of nations, with a service
to render to the international community.
But world influence which is thus the right-
ful privilege of a nation, is easily confounded
with a world power which is gained at the
expense of other nations and maintained to
their detriment. Thus the way is opened
to a rivalry among nations for world power
and a struggle to obtain the coveted mas-
tery by diplomatic strategy and force of
arms. And when nations, carried away by
this ambition for world power, press into
service all the discoveries of modern science
and the products of modem invention to
improve the enginery of war, and utilize all
the costly triumphs of the modern mind in
terrestrial, naval, and aerial locomotion for
purposes of military expedition and attack,
the result is slaughter so stupendous, de-

242 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

struction so colossal, as to exceed our powers
of comprehension. The European war of
1914 has shown not merely that evil of gi-
gantic proportions persists in modern so-
ciety; it has also proved that there are forces
still lurking in human nature which will,
unless controlled, annihilate the whole fab-
ric of modern civilization.

It turns out that democracy, the perfectly
organized society of free persons, is a task
and not a triumph of the modern will.
Evil, that fatal presence, has not been over-
come and eliminated from modern life; man
has taken only the first few steps in its con-
quest, and is consequently able to count
the cost of completing the enterprise. The
great undertakings of the modern spirit,
control of the forces of nature and adjust-
ment of individualities in society, can be
advanced only through the sacrifices of indi-
viduals. This tragic fact that the universal
ideal which the moral will of man now pro-
poses to realize, demands constant and real
sacrifices from human individuals, is fre-

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 243

quently overlooked by optimistic melio-
rists. Man can subdue nature to his uses
only through the sacrifice of his own com-
fort and safety; he can secure co-operation in
society only through the sacrifice of his in-
terests and private ambitions. The one
part of his task involves peril and hardship,
the other discipline and denial, and both
entail struggle and suffering. Now such
sacrifices are not easily made, nor should
they be lightly dismissed. The natural will
which strives to provide man with comfort
and enjoyment during his physical lifetime,
stoutly opposes such sacrifice. Moreover,
this natural will revives and reasserts itself
with renewed strength in modern times.
For the modern spirit, which has sought to
realize a "universal" end through a read-
justment of actual conditions, has succeeded
measurably well in attaining the "natural"
good which man strove in vain to secure
by depending directly upon the sequences
of nature. Hence intelligent individuals
whose situation is at all favorable may be

244 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

tolerably certain to-day of a life of profit-
able and pleasant activity and an old age
of security and ease. Modern science and
invention have multiplied a thousandfold
the conveniences, the comforts, the safe-
guards of man's natural existence. Nat-
uralism has thus taken fresh hold; it threat-
ens to become the controlling influence in
human life. The influence of such modern
naturalism, of course, runs squarely counter
to the devotion to a universal ideal which
demands sacrifice of natural interest and
individual ambition. Its prudential, calcu-
lating spirit once uppermost makes alto-
gether impossible that willingness to sacri-
fice self required for pursuit of the universal
good. If further progress is to be made,
therefore, in attaining the end of universal
human development, man must have the
courage to resist the call of natural plea-
sures and to persevere in the path of strug-
gle and of sacrifice.

One thing, and one thing only, can give to
the modern man courage to make the sac-

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE US

rifices required in the realization of the uni-
versal hfe. That is faith — ^belief in the
essential permanence, the fundamental real-
ity, of personality. The personaUty which
is here beUeved in is personality in its uni-
versal aspect, that personality which em-
braces and includes the lives of others in
intimate and organic union. If such uni-
versal personaUty and not the narrower and
more restricted character of the individual
or the group is the real thing, then the man
who furthers its development through the
use of physical forces or of social agencies
increases his own reahty. He does so even
if his work in the mechanical and social
fields is done at the sacrifice of his own indi-
vidual comfort or health or ambition or
existence itself. Through his very sacrifice
he will, under such assumption, identify
himself most effectually with universal real-
ity; he will raise himself to a higher plane of
existence, he will thereby participate in the
universal life for which his soul yearns.
But how can such faith be gained or, rather,

246 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

regained after it has been lost in a grilling
and benumbing warfare with refractory and
unyielding conditions, both physical and
social? Where else than from religion —
man's never-faiUng resource when faith
wavers and ideals lose their power? The
human will can attain its ultimate end of a
universal personal life only through persis-
tent struggle and continued sacrifice. The
courage required for such struggle and sac-
rifice comes only from faith, faith in the
all-conquering power of personal will. Such
faith is produced and sustained only by
religion. The conclusion to which we are
led, nay driven, is that the moral will of
man can realize the universal good to which
it aspires only if it is assisted and inspired
by rehgious beUef .

Let us set this conclusion clearly before
us. The modern spirit can realize its ideal
of a universal personal life only if it is
strengthened and impelled by rehgious
faith. The hope of progress, of democracy
itself, hes in religion. Only if there is a

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 247

revival of religious faith can the human will
prove equal to the high task it has under-
taken. But the need is not for any religion
whatsoever; not every religion would fulfil
the requirements of the situation. No, in
the present crisis of modern civilization, the
supreme need is for a religion which shall
give power and reality to the ideal of uni-
versal personal development and justify
any sacrifices, no matter how great, made
in its behalf. Is such a religion to be found ?
Fortunately for human progress, such a
religion has been in existence for twenty
centuries, awaiting the time when man
should awake to an appreciation of its sig-
nificance and avail himself of its power.
The fundamental principles of Christianity,
misconceived and misapplied as they have
been, yet in spite of their misinterpreta-
tions proving the most potent influences
that have ever worked for human better-
ment, constitute a religion such as we seek.
At the heart of the teachings of Jesus is a
revelation of the character and will of God.

248 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

In the Christian gospels God is revealed not
as a being whose holiness raises him far
above the human world and whose will is
chiefly absorbed in increasing his own glory.
This is the God of mediaeval asceticism, not
of Christianity. The teachings of the New
Testament reveal to us a God who is ac-
tively engaged in the work of universal bet-
terment. He is indeed the leader of the
forces of righteousness and, Uke all true
leaders, he shares the struggles and priva-
tions of the enterprise. He strives in the
cause of universal progress, himself bearing
the heaviest burden of toil and responsibil-
ity. His omnipotence is not conceived ab-
stractly as the absence of every limitation
in case of every power, an omnipotence
which would make it impossible for him
really to want, to desire, to seek after an
object, because such purpose and pursuit
would indicate a lack and an incomplete-
ness in himself. Rather is his omnipotence
shown positively and concretely in his
moral perfection. And this moral perfec-

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 249

tion does not consist in a passionless purity,
an exalted holiness. On the contrary, God's
moral perfection finds expression according
to the truly Christian view, in the personal
quality to which we human beings attach
highest moral value, benevolence — in benev-
olence, developed to the highest degree.
Now benevolence, as we know it, is always
directed upon persons and reaches its full-
est development, its supreme manifesta-
tion, in suflFering and sacrifice, for its per-
sonal object. In harmony with what is
deepest and most profound in our moral
experience, therefore, Christianity repre-
sents the benevolence of God as expressing
itseK in suffering and self-sacrifice for cher-
ished creatures. It is the unique merit of
Christianity that it dares to attribute these
most searching and significant human ex-
periences of suffering and sacrifice to God
himself. God is revealed as a Father who
loves his human children with the only per-
fect love.

Here, then, is the religious faith needed

250 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

to nerve man for the tremendous under-
taking of modern civilization. This noble
mission it can fulfil because it is of such
character as first to arouse men to vigorous,
persistent effort in the realization of univer-
sal ideals, and, second, to give them the
hope and confidence which they must have
if they are to undergo without discourage-
ment or despair the pain and privation
which this effort must cost them. Let us
then consider a little further these two ser-
vices which true religion promises to render
man at this critical point in his moral devel-
opment.

Belief in a God who is striving to realize
all the possibilities for good in the universe
is bound to inspire man with a zealous de-
termination to do what he can to advance
the cause of universal progress. "My
Father worketh even until now, and I
work," said Jesus, and man is encouraged
by this conception of God to become a fel-
low-worker in the great task of evolution.
If we wish to appreciate the superior mo-

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 251

live power of such a religion, we have only
to compare it with the types of religious be-
lief dominant in the earlier stages of human
progress. The God of the natural man, the
God of power and of justice, had plans of
His own to carry out which did not con-
cern man, except to require his obedience
in certain specific points. Man had also
plans of his own to reahze, and he had no
interest in the purposes of Deity beyond
rendering the specified services required to
escape punishment and gain reward. Hence
no real co-operation between man and God
was possible; only a kind of compromise or
working agreement in which each made a
certain allowance for the interest of the
other. Neither has the God of supernat-
uralism any possible need for assistance
from man; He is engaged in no real under-
taking. All that He purposes is already
completely and finally realized in the per-
fection of his nature. Such a religion fur-
nishes man with no incentive to spend him-
self in the work of world betterment. No

252 FAITfi JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

reason exists, in fact, why he should exert
himself or show any particular zeal in im-
proving worldly conditions. Every event
in universal history is already foreordained,
every emergency is provided for, down to
the last detail; if evil seems to triumph or
failure to threaten the divine plan, the dan-
ger is only apparent, and its appearance is
due to our human short-sightedness. In
such circumstances man is surely justified in
turning his attention away from the earthly
scene and in losing himself in visions of
spiritual perfection. In complete contrast
to these views stands the Christian concep-
tion which represents God as really working
for that ideal of a universal life which the
human will yearns to realize. Such belief
imparts an added worth to that ideal of
complete personal development which man
in rare moments of spiritual vision has pro-
jected; it stamps the loftiest aim of modern
civilization with the seal of divine authority
and approval. Moreover, the belief that
even God is striving and battling to over-

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 253

come adverse conditions implies the further
beUef that the unfinished task offers vast
opportunities to men of doing real work, of
performing real service. Men may expect
by their efforts to make real contributions
to universal progress, and since personal
capacities differ, each individual may hope
to accomplish results which no one else
could achieve. To each human individual,
therefore, the high privilege is given of be-
coming a fellow-worker with God, and of
accomplishing a work which but for his
effort must remain forever undone. Surely
no nobler opportunity for service could be
offered to man !

Besides kindling in the human heart a
zeal to contribute something to universal
progress, the Christian conception of God, if
believed in with the whole heart, produces
in the mind of man a serene confidence in
his own personal destiny which enables him
to undergo without flinching repeated suf-
fering and painful death, if encountered in
the path of duty. Such religious faith re-

254 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

vives man's faith in the permanence of his
personality, in the indestructibihty of the
selfhood which he has by the exercise of
his own will built up. Belief in personal
immortality has been waning in the modern
world, owing to man's increasing knowledge
of the vastness of the physical universe and
the might of its forces in comparison with
which his own strength is so slight, his own
efforts so feeble, his own life so evanescent,
as to appear altogether negligible. This
growing disbelief in immortality is one of
the most ominous signs of the times; it
means that the human will is losing confi-
dence in its own powers. But without con-
fidence in itself human voUtion is bound to
prove entirely unequal to the task which
confronts it. Let volition lose faith in its
own ability to enlarge still further the scope
of personal life and all hope of further prog-
ress is gone. The descent to naturalism
and even to animalism will be precipitous
and final. It is absolutely necessary, there-
fore, that man preserve unshaken his belief

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 255

in the permanence of personality, in the
inconquerable potency of his own rational
will. Such a reUgion as that founded on
the Christian revelation of God seems to
be the only one that will meet the present
need. The immortality which it promises
is not one projected into another world nor
postponed to a future life. It is a hfe which
the human will achieves in the present
world through its efforts and its struggles to
convert existing conditions into means of
universal good. If the God of the Christian
gospels is supremely real, then reality is
measured not in physical but in moral terms,
not according to amount of physical energy
but according to degree of moral excellence.
Now the moral excellence to which supreme
reality is attributed has its source in the
expansive power of personality. This ex-
pansive power, identical, of course, with
personal will, involves as a necessary fea-
ture in its working, suflFering and self-sacri-
fice; for new objects can be sought only at
the cost of abandoning old satisfactions.

256 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

new fields of activity can be discovered
only by breaking down the barriers which
have secured and protected hard-won
sources of certain satisfaction. Suppose
that God himself is not exempt from the
suffering and self-sacrifice essential to per-
sonal development; suppose that he, as the
guiding spirit in the work of universal prog-
ress, makes the greatest sacrifices, suffers
the most intense pain. Then the man who
endures suffering, who sacrifices his most
cherished interests in his efforts to reahze
the Universal Ideal, does not have his
reahty lessened or destroyed thereby, even
if his suffering diminish the amount of his
physical strength or cut short the term of
his natural existence. Rather does he in-
crease his personal reality, since his very
suffering and sacrifice gain him entrance
to the fuller and more comprehensive life
lived by God; his very pain and privation
admit him into fellowship with God, into
permanent union with the Supreme Reality.
The efforts of the human will to extend

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 257

the range of its activity have, as we have
seen, been continually frustrated by unfa-
vorable conditions. In this, of course, con-
sists evil — in the conflict of individual inter-
ests and of human welfare with the natural
order. The result of this maladjustment is
that the good of the whole can be attained
only by the sacrifice of the parts. For this
problem of evil the Christian faith proposes
the only possible solution, by maintaining
that the good of the parts is in its turn se-
cured by the sacrifice of the whole. In the
human individual, then, isolated fragment
of reality as he may seem to be, the Univer-
sal Will, the principle of supreme reality, is
struggling and striving to gain expression.
And in so far as such individual, in obedi-
ence to the promptings of the larger will
within him, sacrifices his narrower actual
interest to the universal good, to just that
degree is he claiming his birthright and
winning permanent reality. Intelligence
and will first appear in organic evolution as
functions of the individual organism; their

258 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

office is to aid in adjusting this organism to
the conditions of its environment and thus
of prolonging its existence. But in man
will has so far developed as to turn the
tables on nature, and to utilize the living
organism as an instrument by which to
transform existing conditions, physical and
social, so as to enlarge the scope of personal
life. Suppose, now, that the will of a
human individual succeeds in achieving
this service, in thus contributing something
to the personal development of humanity.
Such an individual will is no longer the ser-
vant of a bodily organism, dependent upon
it for very existence and bound to perish
when it is dissolved into its elements. It
has freed itself from bondage to the flesh; it
has claimed its birthright of permanent
reality; it has realized its potential univer-
sality. It has, in fact, become an expres-
sion of the Universal Will, manifesting itself
through the multitude of individuals, and is
destined to participate in the realization of
the universal good.

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 259

Thus we reach our final conception of
human progress. We see it as the work of
volition, the effort of Universal Will to ex-
pand the sphere of its activity by availing
itself of all the opportunities for further ex-
pression offered by the nature of things.
But actual conditions prove refractory and
unyielding. Volition is frequently checked
and frustrated in its endeavor to bring them
under control; it is confronted by the prob-
lem of natural evil. In overcoming these
difficulties universal volition gains great
advantage by dividing itself into a vast
number of individual wills. Each of these
individuals is able to concentrate its effort
upon the exploitation of that particular
one out of the many possibilities of nature
with which it is in a position most effectively
to deal. The achievements of individuals
in the mastery of natural conditions are
made permanent possessions of the Univer-
sal Will through communication and co-
operation. But the individuals frequently
prove obstinate and self-centred. They re-

260 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

fuse to make the results they have gained
means to enlarging the scope of others' ac-
tivity; they prefer a transient independence
of action to a permanent participation in
the universal achievement. The very con-
ditions of individuation thus constitute an-
other source of evil; the problem of moral
evil is added to that of natural. This diffi-
culty can be met only by imparting to indi-
viduals added personal power from the
Universal Source, in order that the intrinsic
universaHty belonging to all volition may
serve to counteract the exclusive tendency
of individuahty. If this effect is not se-
cured, the result of making individuals
more powerful will of necessity be to make
them more potent and mischievous in their
independence. Thus universal progress is
essentially a venture; as an enterprise of
will its outcome is uncertain and fraught
with possibiUties of disaster and failure.
But much ground has already been gained.
VoUtion is constantly annexing new terri-
tory and thus enlarging the theatre of its

THE UNIVERSAL LIFE 261

activity; it is successfully liberating itself
from hampering conditions that circum-
scribe its activity, thus enlarging the scope
of the free personal Ufe for which in ful-
ness it yearns. We are justified in hoping,
therefore, that the will which is striving in
universal evolution will not fail in its en-
deavor; that universal progress will not
come short of its goal. We have found
reason to believe, moreover, that the course
of progress is not hke the passing of a torch
onward from one generation to the next,
each generation falling into oblivion when
its task is done, but rather like a rising tide,
a tide of personal life constantly being aug-
mented by the contributions of individuals
who, having had a share in its labors, have
won a right to participate in the satisfac-
tion of final fulfilment, of complete self-
realization.

'^

POSTSCRIPT

THE FUTURE OF RELIGION

Even the briefest survey of the stages in
social evolution is sufficient to demonstrate
the importance of religion as a factor in
human progress. To us religious belief has
appeared as a product of human volition.
Man's gods have been constructions of his
imaginative intelligence, given objectivity
by an effort of his own will. Religion has
not been a mere by-product of social evolu-
tion, however; it ranks as a genuine achieve-
ment of the human will and plays an essen-
tial part in its progressive realization. It
renews man's confidence in the power of his
own will after repeated failures, and gives
him hope and courage for a new venture.
It serves as a defense for ground already
gained in the expansion of human personal-
ity and points the way to new conquests
possible in the realm of spirit. Nor should

262

THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 263

the fact that the objects of religious belief
are projections of the human will lead us to
think that they altogether lack the reaUty
possessed by other objects. Our study has
shown us that the natural universe, with its
multitude of existing things and many in-
teracting forces, is likewise a construction
of man's intelligent volition; is similarly a
matter of faith with him. Religious belief
gains reality, just as all other beliefs do,
through a process of verification. Such
verification comes in the results of action.
If a belief, when acted upon, enlarges the
scope of personal life and opens to the agent
a more varied field for further activity, it is
to that extent realized. For any course of
action is itself a question put to Reality,
and such a result as just suggested is a sign
that Reality gives its sanction to the belief
which prompted it. This is the test to
which religion has constantly been sub-
jected in the course of human progress, and
no one can deny that it has stood the test
successfully.

264 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

But there are degrees of completeness
and of finality in verification. Thus a be-
Hef may stand verified because when acted
upon it increases the control of conscious
personality over the conditions of its activ-
ity, and later have to give way to another
and different belief about the same object,
which when put in practice still further in-
creases the range of man's personal activity.
In such cases the first belief possesses in
comparison with the second only a provi-
sional truth, a temporary vahdity. Now it
must be confessed that religious belief has
in stage after stage of human progress
played this part of provisional truth, has
time after time appeared as a temporary
expedient, extremely valuable, absolutely
necessary, in fact, to tide the human will
over difficult places in its road of progress,
but destined in every instance to give place
to other and contrary beliefs about the na-
ture of the world and the behavior of its
forces. Thus the savage, when the fruit
upon which he depends for his food-supply

THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 265

fails to ripen, may make sacrifices to the
4eity which presides over vegetation, in the
hope that he may supply other fruit of
bush or tree. The belief which prompts
him thus to act steadies and strengthens his
will, while he searches the wood for other
food; thus it is verified. But when man's
advancing intelligence enables him to under-
take systematic agriculture, his behef in the
efiicacy of natural causes to produce the
desired results supersedes this primitive
religious faith. The work of religion is not
done, however; for upon a higher level we
find it springing up anew. When unusual
drouth interrupts the expected course of
growth and fruition, man prays to God to
send the needed rain, relying upon his
promises to aid those human beings who
obey and serve him. This more developed
religion is in its turn superseded; man no
longer prays for rain when, through the ex-
ercise of inventive skill, guided by the con-
clusions of exact science, he is able to de-
vise improved methods of agriculture which

266 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

produce good crops in spite of deficient
rainfall. Such facts as these, patent to the
student of human progress, lead one inevi-
tably to ask if religious belief is not essen-
tially provisional in character, and if its
object, the divine, is more than a vague
adumbration or at best an imaginary sym-
bol of natural processes as yet undiscovered
but nevertheless requisite for the realiza-
tion of man's will and the completion of his
world ?

This question comes home to us most
sharply when we ask it concerning our relig-
ion of the present day, for it seems safe to
suppose that the religious beliefs of modern
civilized society represent religion in the
fullest development to which it has yet
attained. Must we believe that our own
religion at its best is only an expression of
our ignorance of forces which we neverthe-
less recognize as influencing human des-
tiny, along with the determination to dis-
cover and utilize these forces? When we
thus make the question one of the truth of

THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 267

present forms of religion, we are compelled
to recognize the existence in civilized so-
ciety of variant tendencies in religious
belief. Most prominent, perhaps, are two
types which we may call prudential and
mystical. Prudential religion relies upon
God, as a being of power and purpose, to
provide man with the material goods of
earthly existence. Mystical religion ap-
peals to God, as a being of transcendent
purity and holiness, to free man from the
limitations of earthly existence, and to ele-
vate him to the sphere of abiding spiritual
reality. These are, of course, the forms of
religion previously described as character-
istic of the "natural" and "supernatural"
hfe, respectively. It will assist us in un-
derstanding the present religious situation
if we review the leading characteristics of
these two forms of religion.

Prudential religion springs from man's
desire to provide for his own comfort and
security during the period of his natural
existence. This he attempts to do by

268 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

utilizing the resources of his physical en-
vironment. He takes heed of the more ob-
vious processes of nature — the course of the
seasons, the germination, growth, and frui-
tion of plants, the nutrition and reproduc-
tion of animals, planting and gathering his
crops, pasturing and breeding his flocks
and herds. He becomes famihar with the
more accessible materials — wood, stone, and
iron — making tools and building himself
houses and barns. But these natural forces
and agencies prove untrustworthy; through
their uncertain and incalculable action his
plans are set at naught, his prospects
ruined, his health and very existence are
placed in jeopardy. The drouth destroys
his crops, the pestilence kills his herd, fire
and storm devastate his dwellings. In this
emergency he has recourse to religion to
renew his confidence in his own ability to
insure future well-being in the presence of
an uncertain and sometimes hostile environ-
ment. The Deity in whom he believes is
not the "mysterious power" of the savage.

THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 269

however; He is endowed with personaUty
and possessed of definite purposes which He
is interested in reaKzing. With such a God
it is possible to bargain or, if the term be
preferred, to covenant. The man who
obeys His will, acknowledging His sover-
eignty, and worshipping Him according to
the prescribed ritual, He will protect from
accident and calamity, will preserve in
health and prosperity. For, besides being
powerful, God is just — ^just in the sense of
paying what is due in the way of reward or
penalty. The reward of those who obey
the divine commands is at first supposed to
come within the hmits of earthly existence.
But experience proving that fortune does
not discriminate between behevers and un-
believers in this present world, the divine
judgment with its ensuing rewards and pen-
alties is postponed to a future life. But the
relation maintained between God and man
is the same in both cases.

Mystical religion springs from man's
yearning after a spiritual good, for the cul-

270 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

tivation of his own soul through the knowl-
edge of absolute truth and this perception
of ideal beauty. To such spiritual ends we
find him turning when, through repeated
failure, he is led finally to despair of obtain-
ing any certain natural good. In contrast
to wealth and reputation and pleasure,
which are at the mercy of a fickle fortune,
these spiritual goods appear to depend
solely upon the choice and inspiration of
the human will. Thus man comes to place
over against the natural world, which he
repudiates as worthless and disappointing,
a supernatural realm, which he regards as
his eternal home. But it is difficult for him
to maintain his faith in the supreme reality
of such a supernatiu'al realm. The natural
world presses in upon him; hunger and
cold, sickness and death constantly ob-
trude themselves upon his attention. To
strengthen his faith in the supernatural
good to which he has devoted himself, he
again has recourse to religion. God is this
time so conceived as to impart superior and

THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 271

abiding reality to the supernatural world
and the spiritual life. He is characterized
by his personal purity, which raises him out
of any contaminating contact with the nat-
ural world and its many evils. To power
and justice are now added holiness as his
distinguishing attribute. Such a God can
enter into relation with the world of human
affairs only through mediators who bridge
the abysmal guK between the natural and
the supernatural. Through the assistance
of such mediators, however, man may re-
turn to God; he may at once begin the life
of supernatural reaUty, of spiritual bliss.
Naturally, individuals thus saved from the
world will desire during the rest of their
earthly existence to withdraw from human
society in order that, undistracted by
worldly afiFairs, they may taste the joys of
the heavenly vision.

Turning now from the past to the present,
we see both these types of religion existing
in our civiUzed societies. Much of what
passes for Christian faith is either pruden-

272 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

tial or mystical in character, or a mixture
of both. But the student of social and
moral evolution is bound to conclude that
these two types of religion have lost their
value for civilized man and, consequently,
are doomed to disappear from modern so-
ciety. This is not because the needs which
evoked them have disappeared; man labors
no less arduously to provide for his own
future security and comfort; he seeks no
less earnestly the higher spiritual goods.
But he has found other and more effective
means of satisfying these needs than those
furnished by prudential and mystical reUg-
ion. Modern man secures his own natural
existence and well-being, not by bargaining
for divine protection against natural ills,
but by gaining mastery over natural forces
through his own experimental science, in-
ventive skill, and technical proficiency. He
does not rely upon divine providence to
protect him from shipwreck at sea; he
makes a compass, constructs a steamship,
invents the wireless telegraph. He does not

THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 273

expect to avert drouth by prayer; through
scientific research and experiment he so im-
proves his methods of agriculture that a
decided diminution of the rainfall does not
ruin his crops. He does not attempt to
check epidemic by reHgious sacrifices and
processions; he discovers the cause of dis-
ease, learns how to destroy maHgnant germs
or prevent their communication. With re-
gard, secondly, to the spiritual goods whose
acquisition mystical religion pretends to in-
sure, modern man has learned that these
are attained not by individuals who with-
draw from worldly pursuits and devote
themselves to supernatural concerns, but by
those who avail themselves most success-
fully of the spiritual resources of their fel-
low-men, as these are developed through
personal association and co-operation.
Hence modem society aims so to organize
its activities that the insights, the inven-
tions, and the appreciations of all can be
appropriated by each one and made con-
tributory to his personal development. To

274 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

this end it establishes popular education and
promotes free discussion, it encourages re-
search and rewards invention, it fosters art
and stimulates wholesome play.

It is evident that these two undertakings,
the control of nature through the applica-
tion of science to industry and the develop-
ment of man's personal powers through the
organized activities of society, are the pur-
poses of democracy. In fact, taken to-
gether, they constitute the programme of de-
mocracy. For democracy is more than the
abstract ideal of equality. It is the ideal of
a society which provides for the free per-
sonal development of all its members. But
it is also a method. Material necessities
and comforts it proposes to produce and
distribute through the co-operative industry
of its citizens; no privileged class is to be
permitted to live in idleness, supported by
the labor of the remainder. And it pro-
poses to find means of spiritual culture in
this very co-operative industry. For no
class is to be exempted from toil and given

THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 275

leisure for thought and enjoyment; hence, if
spiritual values are to be realized, they must
be found in the performance of the common
task. But this turns out to be their true
source, since industry can become genuinely
co-operative only on the basis of mutual un-
derstanding, mutual helpfulness, mutual
sympathy, and out of these arise knowledge
and power and love of beauty, the choicest
gifts of the spirit. Democracy is thus the
modem method of fulfilling those needs
which prudential and mystical religion arose
to satisfy. No wonder that democracy has
appealed to many minds as a substitute
for religion or, perhaps better, as itself a
reUgion ! That it is a substitute for pruden-
tial and mystical religion, thus supplanting
them both, seems indubitable. If religion
can have no function beyond ministering to
man's need for natural security and spiritual
culture, its work appears to be already done
and its eventual disappearance inevitable.
Or, to put the matter differently, unless new
needs arise, which no existing agency, nat-

276 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

ural or social, can fulfil, religion has no fur-
ther part to play in human history. Have
such needs arisen? More definitely, has
democracy, in providing a method for the
fulfilment of man's needs, natural and spir-
itual, created new needs which only religion
can satisfy? An attempt to answer this
question will bring us at once to what is
truly the religion of the present — ^the relig-
ion of modern civilized society. It repre-
sents the highest development of the re-
Ugious consciousness; it has already been
described as the religion of the universal life.
On what force does democracy depend for
the accomplishment of its task of promoting
the personal development of its members?
Clearly, upon the thoroughgoing co-opera-
tion of its members, upon the absolute de-
votion of individuals to the comprehensive
social good. Such complete co-operation of
mankind in the work of subjugating nature
and cultivating the powers of personality
can be obtained only at the expense of the
private interests of individuals. Every
great enterprise which aims to increase

THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 277

man's control over natural forces lays its
tax upon the health, takes its toll of the
lives of the individuals employed; the con-
struction of a great canal, railway, bridge,
or tunnel, is expected to involve many cas-
ualties among the workers. So also with
invention and discovery; the discoverer of
a new serum pays with his own life; those
who first employ a new remedy jeopardize
their own health and safety. The cost to
individuals who participate in the work of
spiritual enlightenment and progress, if less
obvious, is none the less real. They may
not risk their health or their Hves, but they
are forced to give up private preferences
and individual ambitions as dear to them
as life itself. One who labors for the spirit-
ual advancement of humanity cannot allow
his own taste and talents, in science or in
art, to interfere with his social responsibil-
ity; nay, more, he must be prepared to suf-
fer misunderstanding and even opprobrium
on account of his devotion to social prog-
ress and reform.
Such devotion of individuals to social

278 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

weKare as democracy presupposes thus in-
volves real sacrifice on their part — the en-
durance of pain, privation, and even death
itself, in the service of society. Is it reason-
able to expect from human individuals a
willingness thus to devote themselves to a
social ideal, the capacity for sacrificing their
private interests to its service? On one
condition only — ^that the mass of men are
convinced that the larger social life, the Hfe
of human personality in its universal aspect,
is more permanent, more potent, more real
than the existence of the natural individual
or his private interest. If such is the true
view, then it is evident that the individual
who surrenders his private interests, spends
his strength, and shortens his natural life in
devoted service of society, gains, not loses,
in personal development; since through his
very suffering and sacrifice he raises himself
to a higher plane of reality, that of universal
spiritual life. But this cannot be proved; it
must remain a matter of faith. On the ex-
istence of this faith democracy is altogether

THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 279

dependent, but is of itself powerless to pro-
duce it. Here, then, is the new need
created by democracy, which religion can
alone fulfil — ^the need of faith in the superior
reality of the social community, the com-
munity of persons united through mutual
understanding, service, and sympathy, over
that of natural individuaUty, with its nar-
row interests and exclusive ambitions.
Here, too, is the function of religion in a
democracy — that of giving supernatural
sanction or, better, spiritual reality, to
those social values which have become su-
preme in the course of human progress.

That form of present-day religion which
promises to dominate the future is neither
prudential nor mystical, it is ethical and
social. What particular forms it may take
as time goes on cannot, of course, be pre-
dicted. But it may serve to make more
definite the meaning of social religion if
we try to state the fundamental doctrines
which such a religion must proclaim in
order to discharge its function of upholding

280 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGKESS

the reality of social values. Such a religion
must teach, it would appear:

1. An immortality of the human person
conditioned by his devotion to inclusive
social ends and consequent identification
with the life of the spiritual community.
The future life, as an occasion for reward
or punishment, has ceased to interest the
modern man or move him to action. No
more powerful moral dynamic could be
imagined, however, than that supplied by
behef in an immortality which may be won
— an immortaUty which offers an oppor-
tunity for further personal development to
those individuals who in their earthly exis-
tence have devoted themselves to universal
ends.

2. The existence of a spiritual community
made up of those persons who during the
period of their earthly existence labored
faithfully for the universal human good, and
who, after death has removed them from
the earthly scene, constantly inspire men
to deeds of heroism and self-sacrifice in the

THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 281

service of society. The leaders of this com-
munity are the great moral teachers and
heroes of the race; prominent in it are the
saints and the sages, the patriots and the
martyrs, who through the long centuries
have striven to benefit their fellow-men;
present, also, are all those who in obscure
and humble station have faithfully dis-
charged their social vocation.

3. The immanence and eJEcacy of God
as the guiding spirit of social progress, the
leader in the work of human betterment,
who strives and suffers with us in the cause
of universal evolution.

And now we come to the crucial question
— ^the question that is ever hovering in the
mind of one who considers the "enlight-
ened" reUgion of the present as the outcome
of age-long religious evolution. Must we
suppose that this final form of religious be-
hef is also but a temporary expedient des-
tined to disappear at the time when a wider
experience has furnished man with a scien-
tific knowledge of the facts of the social

282 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

consciousness, its true character and man-
ner of growth? Before venturing to sug-
gest an answer to this question we should
inquire what sort of facts would, if known,
render unnecessary the social religion of the
present, and how such knowledge could be
acquired. Now, if the preceding argument
be sound, this knowledge must be that of
the permanence and continued development
of conscious personality in its universal
social aspect. Such knowledge as this will
be gained only when the experience of those
individuals who have striven and suflFered
for inclusive human ends during their nat-
ural existence, and thereafter continue to
participate in the labors and satisfactions of
social progress, is communicated to their
brethren whose outlook is limited to the
visible world. Is it probable that human
science will devise methods for receiving
such communications.^ Sir Oliver Lodge
believes that he and his fellow-workers in
the Society for Psychical Research have al-
ready received preliminary communications

THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 283

of this kind and that these communications,
increasing in number and significance in
the near future, promise to furnish men
with new sources of power and inspiration.
The painstaking work of such investigators
in a difficult and suspected field deserves
our admiration, and their opinions should
receive respectful attention. As yet they
have not convinced many persons whose
acquaintance with the phenomena under in-
vestigation and with the conditions of sci-
entific verification generally renders them
competent judges. The majority of us re-
main sceptical, probably from a conviction,
strong if not expHcitly justified, that such
facts as these, if they are ever made known,
will not be communicated through the chan-
nels which are being sounded by the Society
for Psychical Research. But suppose that
such knowledge should be acquired, either
in this manner or in some other. Will it
mean that religion is finally discredited and
superseded ? Nay, shall we not rather say,
confirmed and completed ? For in that case

284 FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS

what religion has for so long seen with the
eye of faith will at last have been empiri-
cally made known — that Spirit is the ulti-
mate and prevailing reality.

INDEX

Absolute Ideal: j Conceived
supematurally, 155-156;
as the aim of modern civili-
zation, 215; as a demo-
cratic society, 219 Jf.

Action: As motor adjust-
ment of individual, 79, 80;
as generalized community
practice, 101, 102; pre-
dominant in the natural
life, 168; in modem civili-
zation, 206-208, 216.

Esthetic enjoyment, 230.

Causality, 95.

Christianity: The support of
supematiu*alism, 179; the-
ory of salvation, 183; phi-
losophy of history, 184-189;
as dynamic of modem civi-
lization, 247; ethical value
of. 252.

Co-operation, 225.

Copernicus: Founder of mod-
cm scientific world-view,
8; significance of Coper-
nican astronomy, 9-11.

Darwin: Completes mechan-
ical world-view, 16; opin-
ion of factors in evolution,
17-18.

Democracy: Expressing the
ideal of modem civiliza-

tion, 219 Jf,; depends on

mutual understanding, 222;

on co-operation, 225; on

sympathy, 229; religion of,

279.
Desire: Governs the life of

primitive man, 59; fails of

satisfaction, 76.
Development: Postulate of,

203.
Division of labor, 226.

Efficiency propaganda, 228.

End: Chosen end, as a qual-
ity common to many ob-
jects, 71; as a system of
qualities sought by many
individuals, 105; as a uni-
versal spiritual system,
169; as sought by the
modern will, 218.

Evil: In primitive life, 77;
in natural life, 114-119;
in supernatural life, 173-
176; in modem civiliza-
tion, 232/.; of war, 217,
240; power to endure, 256;
endangering democracy,
228, 277.

Evolution: Postulate of, 203;
goal of, 259.

Faith: Defined, 1; in grati-
fication of primitive desire.

285

286

INDEX

64, 65; primitive religious,
80; in provision for future
need, 90-95; natural re-
ligious, 119 Jf.; in super-
naturalism, 163 jf.; of
modernism, 202; required
from religion in modem
civilization, 245.
Feeling: In volition, 51; in
primitive life, 74.

God: Power of primitive, 80,
81; justice of, 121. 125;
holiness of, 182; benev-
olence of, 249; in social or
ethical religion, 281.

Government: Psychological
basis of, 103, 104.

Humanism: Outcome of mod-
em philosophy, 41-42;
key to human progress, 43,
44.

Idealism: Plato's 145 Jf.; rise
of absolute, 32; errors of
absolute. 33, 34.

Ideas, Platonic, 145 Jf.

Immortality, 125-127; 254.
258, 280.

Industrial arts, 102.

IndustriaHsm, 226.

Instinct: Source of action,
61; development into de-
sire, 63.

Invention, 208 Jf.

Jesus: The founder of Chris-
tianity, 179. 180; His rev-
elation of God, 248.

Kant: Mechanical cosmog-
ony, 13-15; theory of
knowledge, 22-29; trans-
formation of his philosophy
into absolute idealism, 32-

Laboratory science, 213.
Libraries. 224.

Machinery, 209/.

Magic, 87.

Middle Ages: Faith of, 4, 5;
world- view of, 6; pre-
occupation with teleology,
189; symbolism of, 190.

Modem spirit: Expression
of will, 197; different from
naturalism, 198/.

Mystical religion, 269.

Natural law. 88.

Natural life: Character of,

98; dominated by action,

108; failure of, 113-118.
NaturaUstic philosophy:

Cause of decline in faith,

8, 19-21.
Neo-Platonists, 171.
Newton, 12.

Parks and play-grounds, 230.
Philosophy: Corrects excesses

of naturalism, 21.
Plato, 145.

Popular education, 224.
Pragmatism: Origin of, 35;

theory of, 36-38; criticism

of, 39, 40.
Progress: Source of, 57; goal

of, 259.
Pmdential religion, 267.
Psychical research, 282.

INDEX

287

Religion: In primitive life,
79, 80; character of prim-
itive religion, 81, 82; value
of primitive religion, 83;
in the natural life of man,
122; natural polytheism,
119jf.; as the recourse of
supernaturalism, 178;
needed in modem life, 244;
truth of, 262, 263; finality
of, 264; of the present-day,
266, 271; future of. 281/.

Self-sacrifice: 190, 240, 243,
249, 278.

Social reform, 237.

Spiritual life: Conception
of, 132; ideal of, 156/.

Spiritual world: Nature of,
134, 135; discovery of,

' 139-141; constitution of,

^ 141/.

Stoics, 161, 170. 172.

Substance, postulate of, 68. ^

Supernatural life: Charac-
ter of, 162; faith of, 163;
failure of, 173. 193; virtue
of, 190, 196.

Sympathy. 229.

Teleology, postulate of, 166;
in Middle Ages, 190.

Thought: In supernatural-
ism, 187; in modem civili-
zation. 213; in democracy,
222.

War. 117. 240.

Will: As source of human
progress, 43, 57; definition
of, 45-48; thought in, 50;
action in, 52; feeling in.
51; creative of personality,
55; involves faith, 55, 56;
source of belief in objective
existence, 65; in operation
of causes, 96; in absolute
spiritual reality, 132; in
the teleological imity of
the world, 166; in the pos-
sibility of a universal social
life, 197; as realized in uni-
versal evolution. 259.

World: Of primitive human
thought, 69; of the natural
man, 109; of supernatu-
ralism, 159; of modern
thought, 231.

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